I  E)  RA 
OF  THE 
UNIVLRSITY 
or  ILLINOIS 

l90<o 


THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 
ON  THINaS  SEEN  AND  HEARD 


By  the  same  Author 

POEMS.  FcapSvo 

THE    RHYTHM  OF 
LIFE,    AND  OTHEE 

Essays.  FcapSvo 

THE  CHILDREN. 
Fcap  8vo 

THE   SPIRIT  OF 
PLACE,  AND  OTHER 

Essays.  Fcap  8vo 

LATER  POEMS.  Fcap 
8vo 


THE 

COLOUR    OF  LIFE 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 
ON  THINGS  SEEN  AND  HEARD 

BY 

ALICE  MEYNELL 


i 


JOHN  LANE 
THE  BODLEY  HEAD 
LONDON  AND  NEW  YORK 


NINTH  EDITION 
1906 


2>e^^cate^ 

TO 

COVENTRY  PATMORE 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

1.  THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE               .         .  I 

2.  A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY           .         .  8 

3.  CLOUD   15 

4.  WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD    ...  23 

5.  THE  HONOURS  OF  MORTALITY.         .  30 

6.  AT  MONASTERY  GATES      ,         .         .  32 

7.  RUSHES  AND  REEDS           .         .         .  40 

8.  ELEONORA  DUSE       .         .         .         •  45 

9.  DONKEY  RACES         •         •         •         •  53 

10.  GRASS   60 

11.  A  WOMAN  IN  GREY          .         .         ,  65 

12.  SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT       .         .  73 

13.  THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME    .  88 

14.  EYES   96 


THE  COLOUE  OF  LIFE 


ED  has  been  praised  for  its  nobility 
as  the  colour  of  life.  But  the 
true  colour  of  life  is  not  red. 
Red  is  the  colour  of  violence, 
or  of  life  broken  open,  edited,  and  pub- 
lished. Or  if  red  is  indeed  the  colour  of 
life,  it  is  so  only  on  condition  that  it  is 
not  seen.  Once  fully  visible,  red  is  the 
coloiu*  of  life  violated,  and  in  the  act  of 
betrayal  and  of  waste.  Red  is  the  secret 
of  life,  and  not  the  manifestation  thereof. 
It  is  one  of  the  things  the  value  of  which 
is  secrecy,  one  of  the  talents  that  are  to  be 
hidden  in  a  napkin.  The  true  colour  of  life 
is  the  colour  of  the  body,  the  colour  of  the 
covered  red,  the  implicit  and  not  explicit  red 
of  the  living  heart  and  the  pulses.  It  is  the 
modest  colour  of  the  unpublished  blood. 

So  bright,  so  light,  so  soft,  so  mingled, 
the  gentle  colour  of  life  is  outdone  by  all 

A 


2  THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE 


the  colours  of  the  world.  Its  very  beauty  is 
that  it  is  white,  but  less  white  than  milk; 
brown,  but  less  brown  than  earth ;  red,  but 
less  red  than  sunset  or  dawn.  It  is  lucid, 
but  less  lucid  than  the  colour  of  lilies.  It 
has  the  hint  of  gold  that  is  in  all  fine 
colour ;  but  in  our  latitudes  the  hint  is 
almost  elusive.  Under  Sicilian  skies,  indeed, 
it  is  deeper  than  old  ivory  ;  but  under  the 
misty  blue  of  the  English  zenith,  and  the 
warm  grey  of  the  London  horizon,  it  is  as 
delicately  flushed  as  the  paler  wild  roses,  out 
to  their  utmost,  flat  as  stars,  in  the  hedges 
of  the  end  of  June. 

For  months  together  London  does  not  see 
the  colour  of  life  in  any  mass.  The  human 
face  does  not  give  much  of  it,  what  with 
features,  and  beards,  and  the  shadow  of  the 
top -hat  and  ckapeau  melon  of  man,  and  of 
the  veils  of  woman.  Besides,  the  colour  of 
the  face  is  subject  to  a  thousand  injuries  and 
accidents.  The  popular  face  of  the  Londoner 
has  soon  lost  its  gold,  its  white,  and  the 
delicacy  of  its  red  and  brown.  We  miss 
little  beauty  by  the  fact  that  it  is  never  seen 
freely  in  great  numbers  out-of-doors.  You 
get  it  in  some  quantity  when  all  the  heads 


THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE  3 


of  a  great  indoor  meeting  are  turned  at  once 
upon  a  speaker ;  but  it  is  only  in  the  open 
air,  needless  to  say,  that  the  colour  of  life 
is  in  perfection,  in  the  open  air,  clothed 
with  the  sun,"  whether  the  sunshine  be 
golden  and  direct,  or  dazzlingly  diffused  in 
grey. 

The  little  figure  of  the  London  boy  it 
is  that  has  restored  to  the  landscape  the 
human  colour  of  life.  He  is  allowed  to 
come  out  of  all  his  ignominies,  and  to  take 
the  late  colour  of  the  midsummer  north-west 
evening,  on  the  borders  of  the  Serpentine. 
At  the  stroke  of  eight  he  sheds  the  slough 
of  nameless  colours — all  allied  to  the  hues  of 
dust,  soot,  and  fog,  which  are  the  colours  the 
world  has  chosen  for  its  boys — and  he  makes, 
in  his  hundreds,  a  bright  and  delicate  flush 
between  the  grey -blue  water  and  the  grey- 
blue  sky.  Clothed  now  with  the  sun,  he  is 
crowned  by-and-by  with  twelve  stars  as  he 
goes  to  bathe,  and  the  reflection  of  an  early 
moon  is  under  his  feet. 

So  little  stands  between  a  gamin  and  all 
the  dignities  of  Nature.  They  are  so  quickly 
restored.  There  seems  to  be  nothing  to  do, 
but  only  a  little  thing  to  undo.     It  is  like 


4  THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE 


the  art  of  Eleonora  Duse.  The  last  and 
most  finished  action  of  her  intellect,  passion, 
and  knowledge  is,  as  it  were,  the  flicking 
away  of  some  insignificant  thing  mistaken  for 
art  by  other  actors,  some  little  obstacle  to 
the  way  and  liberty  of  Nature. 

All  the  squalor  is  gone  in  a  moment,  kicked 
off  with  the  second  boot,  and  the  child  goes 
shouting  to  complete  the  landscape  with  the 
lacking  colour  of  life.  You  are  inclined  to 
wonder  that,  even  undressed,  he  still  shouts 
with  a  Cockney  accent.  You  half  expect  pure 
vowels  and  elastic  syllables  from  his  restora- 
tion, his  spring,  his  slendemess,  his  brightness, 
and  his  glow.  Old  ivory  and  wild  rose  in 
the  deepening  midsummer  sun,  he  gives  his 
colours  to  his  world  again. 

It  is  easy  to  replace  man,  and  it  will  take 
no  great  time,  where  Natm-e  has  lapsed,  to 
replace  Nature.  It  is  always  to  do,  by  the 
happily  easy  way  of  doing  nothing.  The"  grass 
is  always  ready  to  grow  in  the  streets — and 
no  streets  could  ask  for  a  more  charming 
finish  than  your  green  grass.  The  gasometer 
even  must  fall  to  pieces  unless  it  is  renewed ; 
but  the  grass  renews  itself.  There  is  nothing 
so  remediable  as  the  work  of  modern  man — 


THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE  5 


"a  thought  which  is  also/'  as  Mr  Pecksniff 
said^  very  soothing."  And  by  remediable 
I  mean,  of  course,  destructible.  As  the 
bathing  child  shuffles  off  his  garments — they 
are  few,  and  one  brace  suffices  him  —  so  the 
land  might  always,  in  reasonable  time,  shuffle 
off  its  yellow  brick  and  purple  slate,  and 
all  the  things  that  collect  about  railway 
stations.  A  single  night  almost  clears  the 
air  of  London. 

But  if  the  colour  of  life  looks  so  well  in 
the  rather  sham  scenery  of  Hyde  Park,  it 
looks  brilliant  and  grave  indeed  on  a  real 
sea-coast.  To  have  once  seen  it  there  should 
be  enough  to  make  a  colourist.  O  memor- 
able little  picture  !  The  sun  was  gaining 
colour  as  it  neared  setting,  and  it  set  not 
over  the  sea,  but  over  the  land.  The  sea 
had  the  dark  and  rather  stern,  but  not  cold, 
blue  of  that  aspect  —  the  dark  and  not  the 
opal  tints.  The  sky  was  also  deep.  Every- 
thing was  very  definite,  .without  mystery,  and 
exceedingly  simple.  The  most  luminous  thing 
was  the  shining  white  of  an  edge  of  foam, 
which  did  not  cease  to  be  white  because 
it  was  a  little  golden  and  a  little  rosy  in 
the  sunshine.    It  was  still  the  whitest  thing 


6  THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE 


imaginable.  And  the  next  most  luminous 
thing  was  the  little  child,  also  invested  with 
the  sun  and  the  colour  of  life. 

In  the  case  of  women,  it  is  of  the  living 
and  unpublished  blood  that  the  violent  world 
has  professed  to  be  delicate  and  ashamed. 
See  the  curious  history  of  the  political  rights 
of  woman  under  the  Revolution.  On  the 
scaffold  she  enjoyed  an  ungrudged  share  in 
the  fortunes  of  party.  Political  life  might 
be  denied  her,  but  that  seems  a  trifle  when 
you  consider  how  generously  she  was  per- 
mitted political  death.  She  was  to  spin  and 
cook  for  her  citizen  in  the  obscurity  of  her 
living  hours ;  but  to  the  hour*  of  her  death 
was  granted  a  part  in  the  largest  interests, 
social,  national,  international.  The  blood 
wherewith  she  should,  according  to  Robes- 
pierre, have  blushed  to  be  seen  or  heard  in 
the  tribune,  was  exposed  in  the  public  sight 
unsheltered  by  her  veins. 

Against  this  there  >vas  no  modesty.  Of  all 
privacies,  the  last  and  the  innermost  —  the 
privacy  of  death — was  never  allowed  to  put 
obstacles  in  the  way  of  public  action  for  a 
public  cause.  Women  might  be,  and  were, 
duly  suppressed  when,  by  the  mouth  of  Olympe 


THE  COLOUR  OF  LIFE  7 


de  Gouges,  they  claimed  a  right  to  concur 
in  the  choice  of  representatives  for  the  for- 
mation of  the  laws  " ;  but  in  her  person,  too, 
they  were  liberally  allowed  to  bear  political 
responsibiHty  to  the  Republic.  Olympe  de 
Gouges  was  guillotined.  Robespierre  thus 
made  her  public  and  complete  amends. 


A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY 


of  Nature ;  not  one  who  is  able  to  attempt 
May  in  the  woods  without  a  modem  refer- 
ence to  the  manifold  death  and  destruction 
with  which  the  air^  the  branches,  the  mosses 
are  said  to  be  full,  ' 

But  no  one  has  paused  in  the  course  of 
these  phrases  to  take  notice  of  the  curious 
and  conspicuous  fact  of  the  suppression  of 
death  and  of  the  dead  throughout  this  land- 
scape of  manifest  life.  Where  are  they — 
all  the  dying,  all  the  dead,  of  the  populous 
woods  ?  Where  do  they  hide  their  little 
last  hours,  where  are  they  buried  ?  Where 
is  the  violence  concealed  ?  Under  what  gay 
custom  and  decent  habit  ?  You  may  see,  it 
is  true,  an  earth-worm  in  a  robin's  beak, 
and   may  hear  a  thrush   breaking  a  snail's 


|HERE  is  hardly  a  writer  now — of 
the  third  class  probably  not  one 

I  — who  has  not  something  sharp 
and  sad  to  say  about  the  cruelty 


8 


A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY  9 


shell;  but  these  Httle  things  are,  as  it  were, 
passed  by  with  a  kind  of  twinkle  .for  apology, 
as  by  a  well-bred  man  who  does  openly 
some  little  solecism  which  is  too  slight  for 
direct  mention,  and  which  a  meaner  man 
might  hide  or  avoid.  Unless  you  are  very 
modern  indeed,  you  twinkle  back  at  the 
bird. 

But  otherwise  there  is  nothing  visible  of 
the  havoc  and  the  prey  and  plunder.  It  is 
certain  that  much  of  the  visible  life  passes 
violently  into  other  forms,  flashes  without 
pause  into  another  flame ;  but  not  all.  Amid 
all  the  killing  there  must  be  much  dying. 
There  are,  for  instance,  few  birds  of  prey 
left  in  our  more  accessible  counties  now,  and 
many  thousands  of  birds  must  die  uncaught  by 
a  hawk  and  unpierced.  But  if  their  killing 
is  done  so  modestly,  so  then  is  their  dying 
also.  Short  lives  have  all  these  wild  things, 
but  there  are  innumerable  flocks  of  them 
always  alive  ;  they  must  die,  then,  in  innum- 
erable flocks.  And  yet  they  keep  the  millions 
of  the  dead  out  of  sight. 

Now  and  then,  indeed,  they  may  be  be- 
trayed. It  happened  in  a  cold  winter.  The 
late  frosts  were  so  sudden,  and  the  famine 


10        A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY 


was  so  complete,  that  the  birds  were  taken 
unawares.  The  sky  and  the  earth  conspired 
that  February  to  make  known  all  the  secrets ; 
everything  was  published.  Death  was  mani- 
fest. Editors,  when  a  great  man  dies,  are 
not  more  resolute  than  was  the  frost  of  '95. 

The  birds  were  obliged  to  die  in  public. 
They  were  surprised  and  forced  to  do  thus. 
They  became  like  Shelley  in  the  monument 
which  the  art  and  imagination  of  England 
combined  to  raise  to  his  memory  at  Oxford. 

Frost  was  surely  at  work  in  both  cases, 
and  in  both  it  wrought  wrong.  There  is  a 
similarity  of  unreason  in  betraying  the  death 
of  a  bird  and  in  exhibiting  the  death  of 
Shelley.  The  death  of  a  soldier — passe 
encore.  But  the  death  of  Shelley  was  not 
his  goal.  And  the  death  of  the  birds  is  so 
little  characteristic  of  them  that,  as  has  just 
been  said,  no  one  in  the  world  is  aware  of 
their  dying,  except  only  in  the  case  of  birds 
in  cages,  who,  again,  are  compelled  to  die 
with  observation.  The  woodland  is  guarded 
and  kept  by  a  rule.  There  is  no  display  of 
the  battlefield  in  the  fields.  There  is  no 
tale  of  the  game-bag,  no  boast.  The  hunting 
goes   on,  but  with  strange   decorum.  You 


A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY  11 


may  pass  a  fine  season  under  the  trees,  and 
see  nothing  dead  except  here  and  there 
where  a  boy  has  been  by,  or  a  man  with  a 
trap,  or  a  man  with  a  gun.  There  is  nothing 
like  a  butcher  s  shop  in  the  woods. 

But  the  biographers  have  always  had  other 
ways  than  those  of  the  wild  world.  They 
will  not  have  a  man  to  die  out  of  sight.  I 
have  turned  over  scores  of  Lives,"  not  to 
read  them,  but  to  see  whether  now  and 
again  there  might  be  a  Life "  which  was 
not  more  emphatically  a  death.  But  there 
never  is  a  modern  biography  that  has  taken 
the  hint  of  Nature.  One  and  all,  these  books 
have  the  disproportionate  illness,  the  death 
out  of  all  scale. 

Even  more  wanton  than  the  disclosure  of 
a  death  is  that  of  a  mortal  illness.  If  the 
man  had  recovered,  his  illness  would  have 
been  rightly  his  own  secret.  But  because 
he  did  not  recover,  it  is  assumed  to  be  news 
for  the  first  comer.  Which  of  us  would  suffer 
the  details  of  any  physical  suffering,  over  and 
done  in  our  own  lives,  to  be  displayed  and 
described  }  This  is  not  a  confidence  we  have 
a  mind  to  make  ;  and  no  one  is  authorised 
to  ask  for  attention  or  pity  on  our  behalf. 


12        A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY 


The  story  of  pain  ought  not  to  be  told  of 
us,  seeing  that  by  us  it  would  assuredly  not 
be  told. 

There  is  only  one  other  thing  that  concerns 
a  man  still  more  exclusively,  and  that  is  his 
own  mental  illness,  or  the  dreams  and  illu- 
sions of  a  long  delirium.  When  he  is  in 
common  language  not  himself,  amends  should 
be  made  for  so  bitter  a  paradox ;  he  should 
be  allowed  such  solitude  as  is  possible  to 
the  alienated  spirit ;  he  should  be  left  to 
the  ^^not  himself,"  and  spared  the  intrusion 
against  which  he  can  so  ill  guard  that  he 
could  hardly  have  even  resented  it. 

The  double  helplessness  of  delusion  and 
death  should  keep  the  door  of  Rossetti's 
house,  for  example,  and  refuse  him  to  the 
reader.  His  mortal  illness  had  nothing  to 
do  with  his  poetry.  Some  rather  affected 
objection  is  taken  every  now  and  then  to 
the  publication  of  some  facts  (others  being 
already  well  known)  in  the  life  of  Shelley. 
Nevertheless,  these  are  all,  properly  speaking, 
biography.  What  is  not  biography  is  the 
detail  of  the  accident  of  the  manner  of  his 
death,  the  detail  of  his  cremation.  Or  if  it 
was  to  be  told — told  briefly — it  was  certainly 


A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY  13 


not  for  marble.  Shelley's  death  had  no 
significance,  except  inasmuch  as  he  died 
young.  It  was  a  detachable  and  disconnected 
incident.  Ah,  that  was  a  frost  of  fancy  and 
of  the  heart  that  used  it  so,  dealing  with 
an  insignificant  fact,  and  conferring  a  futile 
immortality.  Those  are  ill-named  biographers 
who  seem  to  think  that  a  betrayal  of  the 
ways  of  death  is  a  part  of  their  ordinary 
duty,  and  that  if  material  enough  for  a  last 
chapter  does  not  lie  to  their  hand  they  are 
to  search  it  out.  They,  of  all  survivors,  are 
called  upon,  in  honour  and  reason,  to  look 
upon  a  death  with  more  composure.  To 
those  who  loved  the  dead  closely,  this  is,  for 
a  time,  impossible.  To  them  death  becomes, 
for  a  year,  disproportionate.  Their  dreams 
are  fixed  upon  it  night  by  night.  They 
have,  in  those  dreams,  to  find  the  dead  in 
some  labyrinth ;  they  have  to  mourn  his 
dying  and  to  welcome  his  recovery  in  such 
a  mingling  of  distress  and  of  always  incredu- 
lous happiness  as  is  not  known  even  to 
dreams  save  in  that  first  year  of  separation. 
But  they  are  not  biographers. 

If  death  is  the  privacy  of  the  woods,  it  is 
the  more  conspicuously  secret  because  it  is 


14        A  POINT  OF  BIOGRAPHY 


their  only  privacy.    You  may  watch  or  may 

surprise  everything  else.    The  nest  is  retired^ 

not  hidden.    The  chase  goes  on  everywhere. 

It   is   wonderful   how   the   perpetual  chase 

seems  to  cause  no  perpetual  fear.    The  songs 

are  all  audible.    Life  is  undefended^  careless^ 

nimble  and  noisy. 

It  is  a  happy  thing  that  minor  artists  have 

ceased^  or  almost  ceased,  to  paint  dead  birds. 

Time  was  when  they  did  it  continually  in  that 

British  School  of  water  -  colour  art,  stippled, 

of  which  surrounding  nations,  it  was  agreed, 

were  envious.    They  must  have  killed  their 

« 

bird  to  paint  him,  for  he  is  not  to  be  caught 
dead.  A  bird  is  more  easily  caught  alive 
than  dead. 

A  poet,  on  the  contrary,  is  easily  —  too 
easily  —  caught  dead.  Minor  artists  now 
seldom  stipple  the  bird  on  its  back,  but  a 
good  sculptor  and  a  University  together 
modelled  their  Shelley  on  his  back,  unessen- 
tially drowned ;  and  everybody  may  read 
about  the  sick  mind  of  Dante  Rossetti. 


CLOUD 


URING  a  part  of  the  year  London 
does  not  see  the  clouds.  Not 
to  see  the  clear  sky  might  seem 
her  chief  loss,  but  that  is  shared 


by  the  rest  of  England,  and  is,  besides,  but 
a  slight  privation.  Not  to  see  the  clear  sky 
is,  elsewhere,  to  see  the  cloud.  But  not  so 
in  London.  You  may  go  for  a  week  or  two 
at  a  time,  even  though  you  hold  your  head 
up  as  you  walk,  and  even  though  you  have 
windows  that  really  open,  and  yet  you  shall 
see  no  cloud,  or  but  a  single  edge,  the  frag- 
ment of  a  form. 

Guillotine  windows  never  wholly  open,  but 
are  filled  with  a  doubled  glass  towards  the 
sky  when  you  open  them  towards  the  street. 
They  are,  therefore,  a  sure  sign  that  for  all 
the  years  when  no  other  windows  were  used 
in  London,  nobody  there  cared  much  for  the 
sky,  or  even  knew  so  much  as  whether  there 
were  a  sky. 


16 


CLOUD 


But  the  privation  of  cloud  is  indeed  a  graver 
loss  than  the  world  knows.  Terrestrial  scenery 
is  much,  but  it  is  not  all.  Men  go  in  search 
of  it;  but  the  celestial  scenery  journeys  to 
them.  It  goes  its  way  round  the  world.  It 
has  no  nation,  it  costs  no  weariness,  it  knows 
no  bonds.  The  terrestrial  scenery  —  the 
tourist's — is  a  prisoner  compared  with  this. 
The  tourist's  scenery  moves  indeed,  but  only 
like  Wordsworth's  maiden,  with  earth's  diurnal 
course;  it  is  made  as  fast  as  its  own  graves. 
And  for  its  changes  it  depends  upon  the 
mobility  of  the  skies.  The  mere  green  flush- 
ing of  its  own  sap  makes  only  the  least  of 
its  varieties;  for  the  greater  it  must  wait 
upon  the  visits  of  the  light.  Spring  and 
autumn  are  inconsiderable  events  in  a  land- 
scape compared  with  the  shadows  of  a  cloud. 

The  cloud  controls  the  light,  and  the  moun- 
tains on  earth  appear  or  fade  according  to 
its  passage;  they  wear  so  simply,  from  head 
to  foot,  the  luminous  grey  or  the  emphatic 
purple,  as  the  cloud  permits,  that  their  own 
local  colour  and  their  own  local  season  are 
lost  and  cease,  effaced  before  the  all-important 
mood  of  the  cloud. 

The  sea  has  no  mood  except  that  of  the 


CLOUD 


17 


sky  and  of  its  winds.  It  is  the  cloud  that, 
holding  the  sun's  rays  in  a  sheaf  as  a  giant 
holds  a  handful  of  spears,  strikes  the  horizon, 
touches  the  extreme  edge  with  a  deUcate 
revelation  of  light,  or  suddenly  puts  it  out 
and  makes  the  foreground  shine. 

Every  one  knows  the  manifest  work  of  the 
cloud  when  it  descends  and  partakes  in  the 
landscape  obviously,  lies  half-way  across  the 
mountain  slope,  stoops  to  rain  heavily  upon 
the  lake,  and  blots  out  part  of  the  view  by 
the  rough  method  of  standing  in  front  of  it. 
But  its  greatest  things  are  done  from  its  own 
place,  aloft.  Thence  does  it  distribute  the 
sun. 

Thence  does  it  lock  away  between  the 
hills  and  valleys  more  mysteries  than  a  poet 
conceals,  but,  like  him,  not  by  interception. 
Thence  it  writes  out  and  cancels  all  the  tracery 
of  Monte  Rosa,  or  lets  the  pencils  of  the  sun 
renew  them.  Thence,  hiding  nothing,  and  yet 
making  dark,  it  sheds  deep  colour  upon  the 
forest  land  of  Sussex,  so  that,  seen  from  the 
hills,  all  the  country  is  divided  between  grave 
blue  and  graver  sunlight. 

And  all  this  is  but  its  influence,  its  second- 
ary work  upon  the  world.    Its  own  beauty  is 

B 


18 


CLOUD 


unaltered  when  it  has  no  earthly  beauty  to 
improve.  It  is  always  great:  above  the 
street,  above  the  suburbs,  above  the  gas- 
works and  the  stucco,  above  the  faces  of 
painted  white  houses  —  the  painted  surfaces 
that  have  been  devised  as  the  only  things 
able  to  vulgarise  light,  as  they  catch  it  and 
reflect  it  grotesquely  from  their  importunate 
gloss.  This  is  to  be  well  seen  on  a  sunny 
evening  in  Regent  Street. 

Even  here  the  cloud  is  not  so  victorious  as 
when  it  towers  above  some  little  landscape  of 
rather  paltry  interest  —  a  conventional  river 
heavy  with  water,  gardens  with  their  little 
evergreens,  walks,  and  shrubberies;  and  thick 
trees,  impervious  to  the  light,  touched,  as  the 
novelists  always  have  it,  with  autumn  tints." 
High  over  these  rises,  in  the  enormous  scale 
of  the  scenery  of  clouds,  what  no  man 
expected — an  heroic  sky.  Few  of  the  things 
that  were  ever  done  upon  earth  are  great 
enough  to  be  done  under  such  a  heaven.  It 
was  surely  designed  for  other  days.  It  is  for 
an  epic  world.  Your  eyes  sweep  a  thousand 
miles  of  cloud.  What  are  the  distances  of 
earth  to  these,  and  what  are  the  distances  of 
the    clear   and   cloudless   sky.^     The  very 


CLOUD 


19 


horizons  of  the  landscape  are  near,  for  the 
round  world  dips  so  soon;  and  the  distances 
of  the  mere  clear  sky  are  unmeasured — you 
rest  upon  nothing  until  you  come  to  a  star, 
and  the  star  itself  is  immeasiu'able. 

But  in  the  sky  of  "sunny  Alps"  of  clouds 
the  sight  goes  farther,  with  conscious  flight, 
than  it  could  ever  have  journeyed  otherwise. 
Man  would  not  have  known  distance  veritably 
without  the  clouds.  There  are  mountains 
indeed,  precipices  and  deeps,  to  which  those 
of  the  earth  are  pigmy.  Yet  the  sky-heights, 
being  so  far  off,  are  not  overpowering  by 
disproportion,  like  some  futile  building  fatu- 
ously made  too  big  for  the  human  measure. 
The  cloud  in  its  majestic  place  composes 
with  a  little  Perugino  tree.  For  you  stand 
or  stray  in  the  futile  building,  while  the 
cloud  is  no  mansion  for  man,  and  out  of 
reach  of  his  limitations. 

The  cloud,  moreover,  controls  the  sun,  not 
merely  by  keeping  the  custody  of  his  rays, 
but  by  becoming  the  counsellor  of  his  temper. 
The  cloud  veils  an  angry  sun,  or,  more  terribly, 
lets  fly  an  angry  ray,  suddenly  bright  upon 
tree  and  tower,  with  iron-grey  storm  for  a 
background.    Or  when  anger  had  but  threat- 


20 


CLOUD 


ened,  the  cloud  reveals  him^  gentle  beyond 
hope.  It  makes  peace^  constantly^  just  before 
sunset. 

It  is  in  the  confidence  of  the  winds^  and 
wears  their  colours.  There  is  a  heavenly 
game^  on  south-west  wind  days^  when  the 
clouds  are  bowled  by  a  breeze  from  behind 
the  evening.  They  are  round  and  brilliant, 
and  come  leaping  up  from  the  horizon  for 
hours.    This  is  a  frolic  and  haphazard  sky. 

All  unlike  this  is  the  sky  that  has  a  centre, 
and  stands  composed  about  it.  As  the  clouds 
marshalled  the  earthly  mountains,  so  the 
clouds  in  turn  are  now  ranged.  The  tops  of 
all  the  celestial  Andes  aloft  are  swept  at 
once  by  a  single  ray,  warmed  with  a  single 
colour.  Promontory  after  league -long  pro- 
montory of  a  stiller  Mediterranean  in  the  sky 
is  called  out  of  mist  and  grey  by  the  same 
finger.  The  cloudland  is  very  great,  but  a 
sunbeam  makes  all  its  nations  and  continents 
sudden  with  light. 

All  this  is  for  the  untravelled.  All  the 
winds  bring  him  this  scenery.  It  is  only  in 
London,  for  part  of  the  autumn  and  part  of  the 
winter,  that  the  unnatural  smoke-fog  comes 
between.    And  for  many  and  many  a  day  no 


CLOUD 


21 


London  eye  can  see  the  horizon^  or  the  first 
threat  of  the  cloud  like  a  man's  hand.  There 
never  was  a  great  painter  who  had  not 
exquisite  horizons^  and  if  Corot  and  Crome 
were  rights  the  Londoner  loses  a  great 
thing. 

He  loses  the  coming  of  the  cloudy  and 
when  it  is  high  in  air  he  loses  its  shape.  A 
cloud-lover  is  not  content  to  see  a  snowy  and 
rosy  head  piling  into  the  top  of  the  heavens; 
he  wants  to  see  the  base  and  the  altitude. 
The  perspective  of  a  cloud  is  a  great  part  of 
its  design — whether  it  lies  so  that  you  can 
look  along  the  immense  horizontal  distances 
of  its  floor^  or  whether  it  rears  so  upright  a 
pillar  that  you  look  up  its  mountain  steeps 
in  the  sky  as  you  look  at  the  rising  heights 
of  a  mountain  that  stands^  with  you^  on  the 
earth. 

The  cloud  has  a  name  suggesting  darkness ; 
nevertheless^  it  is  not  merely  the  guardian  of 
the  sun's  rays  and  their  director.  It  is  the 
sun's  treasurer;  it  holds  the  light  that  the 
world  has  lost.  We  talk  of  sunshine  and 
moonshine^  but  not  of  cloud-shine^  which  is 
yet  one  of  the  illuminations  of  our  skies.  A 
shining  cloud  is  one  of  the  most  majestic  of 


22 


CLOUD 


all  secondary  lights.  If  the  reflecting  moon 
is  the  bride,  this  is  the  friend  of  the  bride- 
groom. 

Needless  to  say,  the  cloud  of  a  thunderous 
summer  is  the  most  beautiful  of  all.  It  has 
spaces  of  a  grey  for  which  there  is  no  name, 
and  no  other  cloud  looks  over  at  a  vanishing 
sun  from  such  heights  of  blue  air.  The 
shower-cloud,  too,  with  its  thin  edges,  comes 
across  the  sky  with  so  influential  a  flight  that 
no  ship  going  out  to  sea  can  be  better  worth 
watching.  The  dullest  thing  perhaps  in  the 
London  streets  is  that  people  take  their  rain 
there  without  knowing  §inything  of  the  cloud 
that  drops  it.  It  is  merely  rain,  and  means 
wetness.  The  shower-cloud  there  has  limits 
of  time,  but  no  limits  of  form,  and  no  history 
whatever.  It  has  not  come  from  the  clear 
edge  of  the  plain  to  the  south,  and  will  not 
shoulder  anon  the  hill  to  the  north.  The  rain, 
for  this  city,  hardly  comes  or  goes;  it  does 
but  begin  and  stop.  No  one  looks  after  it 
on  the  path  of  its  retreat. 


WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD 


VERY  wind  is,  or  ought  to  be, 
a  poet;  but  one  is  classic  and 
converts  everything  in  his  day  co 
unity;  another  is  a  modern  man, 
whose  words  clothe  his  thoughts,  as  the  modern 
critics  used  to  say  prettily  in  the  early  sixties, 
and  therefore  are  separable.  This  wind,  again, 
has  a  style,  and  that  wind  a  mere  manner. 
Nay,  there  are  breezes  from  the  east-south- 
east, for  example,  that  have  hardly  even  a 
manner.  You  can  hardly  name  them  unless 
you  look  at  the  weather  vane.  So  they  do 
not  convince  you  by  voice  or  colour  of  breath ; 
you  place  their  origin  and  assign  them  a  his- 
tory according  as  the  hesitating  arrow  points 
on  the  top  of  yonder  ill -designed  London 
spire. 

The  most  certain  and  most  conquering  of 
all  is  the  south-west  wind.  You  do  not  look 
to  the  weather-vane  to  decide  what  shall  be 

23 


24         WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD 


the  style  of  your  greeting  to  his  morning. 
There  is  no  arbitrary  rule  of  courtesy  between 
you  and  him^  and  you  need  no  arrow  to  point 
to  his  distinctions^  and  to  indicate  to  you  the 
right  manner  of  treating  such  a  visitant. 

He  prepares  the  dawn.  While  it  is  still 
dark  the  air  is  warned  of  his  presence^  and 
before  the  window  was  opened  he  was  already 
in  the  room.  His  sun — for  the  sun  is  his — 
rises  in  a  south-west  mood^  with  a  bloom  on 
the  blue^  the  grey^  or  the  gold.  When  the 
south-west  is  cold^  the  cold  is  his  own  cold — 
rounds  blunt,  full,  and  gradual  in  its  very 
strength.  It  is  a  fresh  cold,  that  comes  with 
an  approach,  and  does  not  challenge  you  in 
the  manner  of  an  unauthorised  stranger,  but 
instantly  gets  your  leave,  and  even  a  welcome 
to  your  house  of  life.  He  follows  your  breath 
in  at  your  throat,  and  your  eyes  are  open  to 
let  him  in,  even  when  he  is  cold.  Your  blood 
cools,  but  does  not  hide  from  him. 

He  has  a  splendid  way  with  his  sky.  In 
his  flight,  which  is  that,  not  of  a  bird,  but  of 
a  flock  of  birds,  he  flies  high  and  low  at  once  : 
high  with  his  higher  clouds,  that  keep  long 
in  the  sight  of  man,  seeming  to  move  slowly; 
and  low  with  the  coloured  clouds  that  breast 


WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD  25 


the  hills  and  are  near  to  the  tree-tops.  These 
the  south-west  wind  tosses  up  from  his  soft 
horizon^  round  and  successive.  They  are  tinted 
somewhat  like  ripe  clover-fields^  or  like  hay- 
fields  just  before  the  cutting,  when  all  the  grass 
is  in  flower^  and  they  are,  oftener  than  all  other 
clouds,  in  shadow.  These  low-lying  flocks  are 
swift  and  brief ;  the  wind  casts  them  before 
him,  from  the  western  verge  to  the  eastern. 

Corot  has  painted  so  many  south-west  winds 
that  one  might  question  whether  he  ever 
painted,  in  his  later  manner  at  least,  any 
others.  His  skies  are  thus  in  the  act  of 
flight,  with  lower  clouds  outrunning  the  higher, 
the  farther  vapom-s  moving  like  a  fleet  out  at 
sea,  and  the  nearer  like  dolphins.  In  his 
"  Classical  Landscape :  Italy,''  the  master  has 
indeed  for  once  a  sky  that  seems  at  anchor, 
or  at  least  that  moves  with  ^^no  pace  per- 
ceived." The  vibrating  wings  are  folded,  and 
Corot' s  wind,  that  flew  through  so  many 
springs,  summers,  and  Septembers  for  him 
(he  was  seldom  a  painter  of  very  late  autumn), 
that  was  mingled  with  so  many  aspen-leaves, 
that  strewed  his  forests  with  wood  for  the 
gatherer,  and  blew  the  broken  lights  into  the 
glades,  is  charmed  into  stillness,  and  the  sky 


26         WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD 


into  another  kind  of  immortality.  Nor  are 
the  trees  in  this  antique  landscape  the  trees 
so  long  intimate  with  Corot's  south-west  wind, 
so  often  entangled  with  his  uncertain  twilights. 
They  are  as  quiet  as  the  cloud,  and  such  as 
th©  long  and  wild  breezes  of  Romance  have 
never  shaken  or  enlaced. 

Upon  all  our  islands  this  south-west  wind 
is  the  sea  wind.  But  elsewhere  there  are 
sea  winds  that  are  not  from  the  south-west. 
They,  too,  none  the  less,  are  conquerors. 
They,  too,  are  always  strong,  compelling 
winds  that  take  possession  of  the  light,  the 
shadow,  the  sun,  moon,  and  stars,  and  con- 
strain them  all  alike  to  feel  the  sea.  Not  a 
field,  not  a  hillside,  on  a  sea-wind  day,  but 
shines  with  some  soft  sea-lights.  The  moon's 
little  boat  tosses  on  a  sea-wind  night. 

The  south-west  wind  takes  the  high  Italian 
coasts.  He  gathers  the  ilex  woods  together 
and  throngs  them  close,  as  a  sheep-dog  gathers 
the  sheep.  They  crowd  for  shelter,  and  a 
great  wall,  leaning  inland  also,  with  its  strong 
base  to  the  sea,  receives  them.  It  is  blank 
and  sunny,  and  the  trees  within  are  sunny 
and  dark,  serried,  and  their  tops  swept  and 
flattened  by  months  of  sea -storms.     On  the 


WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD  27 


farther  side  there  are  gardens — gardens  that 
have  in  their  midst  those  quietest  things  in 
all  the  world  and  most  windless,  box-hedges 
and  ponds.  The  gardens  take  shelter  behind 
the  scared  and  hurried  ilex  woods,  and  the 
sea-wind  spares  them  and  breaks  upon  the 
mountain.  But  the  garden  also  is  his,  and 
his  wild  warm  days  have  filled  it  with  orange- 
trees  and  roses,  and  have  given  all  the  abund- 
ant charm  to  its  gay  neglect,  to  its  grass-grown 
terraces,  and  to  all  its  lapsed,  forsaken,  and 
forgotten  dainties. 

Nothing  of  the  nature  in  this  seaward  Italy 
would  be  so  beautiful  without  the  touch  of 
man  and  of  the  sea  gales. 

When  the  south-west  wind  brings  his  rain 
he  brings  it  with  the  majestic  onset  announced 
by  his  breath.  And  when  the  light  follows, 
it  comes  from  his  own  doorway  in  the  verge. 
His  are  the  opened  evenings  after  a  day  shut 
down  with  cloud.  He  fills  the  air  with  in- 
numerable particles  of  moisture  that  scatter 
and  bestow  the  sun.  There  are  no  other 
days  like  his,  of  so  universal  a  harmony,  so 
generous. 

The  north  wind  has  his  own  landscape, 
too;  but  the  east  wind  never.     The  aspect 


28         WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD 


which  he  gives  to  the  day  is  not  all  his 
own.  The  sunshine  is  sweet  in  spite  of  him. 
The  clouds  go  under  his  whip,  but  they  have 
kinder  greys  than  should  be  the  colours  of 
his  cold.  Not  on  an  east-wind  day  are  these 
races  in  heaven,  for  the  clouds  are  all  far  off. 
His  rain  is  angry,  and  it  flies  against  the  sun- 
set. The  world  is  not  one  in  his  reign,  but 
rather  there  is  a  perpetual  revolt  or  difference. 
The  lights  and  shadows  are  not  all  his.  The 
waxing  and  waning  hours  are  disaffected.  He 
has  not  a  great  style,  and  does  not  convince 
the  day. 

All  the  four  winds  are  brave,  and  not  the 
less  brave  because,  on  their  way  through 
town,  they  are  betrayed  for  a  moment  into 
taking  part  in  any  paltriness  that  may  be 
there.  On  their  way  from  the  Steppes  to 
the  Atlantic  they  play  havoc  with  the  nerves 
of  very  insignificant  people.  A  part,  as  it 
were,  of  every  gale  that  starts  in  the  far 
north-east  finds  its  goal  in  the  breath  of  a 
reluctant  citizen. 

You  will  meet  a  wind  of  the  world  nimble 
and  eager  in  a  sorry  street.  But  these  are 
only  accidents  of  the  way — the  winds  go  free 
again.    Those  that  do  not  go  free,  but  close 


WINDS  OF  THE  WORLD  29 

their  course^  are  those  that  are  breathed  by 
the  nostrils  of  Hving  creatures.  A  great 
flock  of  those  wild  birds  come  to  a  final  pause 
in  London,  and  fan  the  fires  of  life  with 
those  wings  in  the  act  of  folding.  In  the 
blood  and  breath  of  a  child  close  the  influences 
of  continent  and  sea. 


THE  HONOURS  OP  MORTALITY 


HE  brilliant  talent  which  has  quite 
lately  and  quite  suddenly  arisen^ 
to  devote  itself  to  the  use  of  the 
day  or  of  the  week,  in  illustrated 
papers — the  enormous  production  of  art  in 
black  and  white  —  is  assuredly  a  confession 
that  the  Honours  of  MortaUty  are  worth 
working  for.  Fifty  years  ago,  men  worked 
for  the  honours  of  immortality;  these  were 
the  commonplace  of  their  ambition;  they  de- 
clined to  attend  to  the  beauty  of  things  of 
use  that  were  destined  to  be  broken  and 
worn  out,  and  they  looked  forward  to  surviv- 
ing themselves  by  painting  bad  pictures;  so 
that  what  to  do  with  their  bad  pictures  in 
addition  to  our  own  has  become  the  problem 
of  the  nation  and  of  the  householder  alike. 
To-day  men  have  begun  to  learn  that  their 
sons  will  be  grateful  to  them  for  few  be- 
quests. Art  consents  at  last  to  work  upon 
30 


THE  HONOURS  OF  MORTALITY  31 


the  tissue  and  the  china  that  are  doomed 
to  the  natural  and  necessary  end — destruc- 
tion;  and  art  shows  a  most  dignified  alacrity 
to  do  her  best^  daily^  for  the  process/'  and 
for  oblivion. 

Doubtless  this  abandonment  of  hopes  so 
large  at  once  and  so  cheap  costs  the  artist 
something;  nay,  it  implies  an  acceptance  of 
the  inevitable  that  is  not  less  than  heroic. 
And  the  reward  has  been  in  the  singular 
and  manifest  increase  of  vitality  in  this  work 
which  is  done  for  so  short  a  life.  Fittingly 
indeed  does  life  reward  the  acceptance  of 
death,  inasmuch  as  to  die  is  to  have  been 
alive.  There  is  a  real  circulation  of  blood — 
quick  use,  brief  beauty,  abolition,  recreation. 
The  honour  of  the  day  is  for  ever  the  honour 
of  that  day.  It  goes  into  the  treasury  of 
things  that  are  honestly  and  completely  ended 
and  done  with.  And  when  can  so  happy  a 
thing  be  said  of  a  lifeless  oil-painting  ?  Who 
of  the  wise  would  hesitate  ?  To  be  honour- 
able for  one  day — one  named  and  dated  day, 
separate  from  all  other  days  of  the  ages — or 
to  be  for  an  unlimited  time  tedious.^ 


AT  MONASTERY  GATES 

f 

O  woman  has  ever  crossed  the  inner 
threshold,  or  shall  ever  cross  it, 
unless  a  queen,  English  or  foreign, 
should  claim  her  privilege.  There- 
fore, if  a  woman  records  here  the  slighter 
things  visible  of  the  monastic  life,  it  is  only 
because  she  was  not  admitted  to  see  more  than 
beautiful  courtesy  and  friendliness  were  able 
to  show  her  in  guest-house  and  garden. 

The  Monastery  is  of  fresh-looking  Gothic, 
by  Pugin  —  the  first  of  the  dynasty :  it  is 
reached  by  the  white  roads  of  a  limestone 
country,  and  backed  by  a  young  plantation, 
and  it  gathers  its  group  of  buildings  in  a  cleft 
high  up  among  the  hills  of  Wales.  The  brown 
habit  is  this,  and  these  are  the  sandals,  that 
come  and  go  by  hills  of  finer,  sharper,  and 
loftier  line,  edging  the  dusk  and  dawn  of  an 
Umbrian  sky.  Just  such  a  Via  Crucis  climbs 
the  height  above  Orta,  and  from  the  foot  of 
32 


AT  MONASTERY  GATES  33 


its  final  crucifix  you  can  see  the  sunrise  touch 
the  top  of  Monte  Rosa,  while  the  encircled 
lake  below  is  cool  with  the  last  of  the  night. 
The  same  order  of  friars  keep  that  sub-Alpine 
Monte  Sacro,  and  the  same  have  set  the 
Kreuzberg  beyond  Bonn  with  the  same  steep 
path  by  the  same  fourteen  chapels,  facing 
the  Seven  Mountains  and  the  Rhine. 

Here,  in  North  Wales,  remote  as  the 
country  is,  with  the  wheat  green  over  the 
blunt  hill-tops,  and  the  sky  vibrating  with 
larks,  a  long  wing  of  smoke  lies  round  the 
horizon.  The  country,  rather  thinly  and 
languidly  cultivated  above,  has  a  valuable 
sub-soil,  and  is  burrowed  with  mines;  the 
breath  of  pit  and  factory,  out  of  sight, 
thickens  the  lower  sky,  and  lies  heavily 
over  the  sands  of  Dee.  It  leaves  the  upper 
blue  clear  and  the  head  ot  Orion,  but  dims 
the  flicker  of  Sirius  and  shortens  the  steady 
ray  of  the  evening  star.  The  people  scat- 
tered about  are  not  mining  people,  but  half- 
hearted agriculturists,  and  very  poor.  Their 
cottages  are  rather  cabins ;  not  a  tiled  roof 
is  in  the  country,  but  the  slates  have  taken 
some  beauty  with  time,  having  dips  and 
dimples,  and  grass  upon  their  edges.  The 


34  AT  MONASTERY  GATES 


walls  are  all  thickly  whitewashed,  which  is 
a  pleasure  to  see.  How  willingly  would  one 
swish  the  harmless  whitewash  over  more  than 
half  the  colour — over  all  the  chocolate  and 
all  the  blue — with  which  the  buildings  of 
the  world  are  stained!  You  could  not  wish 
for  a  better,  simpler,  or  fresher  harmony 
than  whitewash  makes  with  the  slight  sun- 
shine and  the  bright  grey  of  an  English  sky. 

The  grey-stone,  grey-roofed  monastery  looks 
young  in  one  sense — it  is  modern;  and  the 
friars  look  young  in  another — they  are  like 
their  brothers  of  an  earlier  time.  No  one, 
except  the  journalists  of  yesterday,  would 
spend  upon  them  those  tedious  words, 
quaint,"  or  ^^old  world."  No  such  weary 
adjectives  are  spoken  here,  unless  it  be  by 
the  excursionists. 

With  large  aprons  tied  over  their  brown 
habits,  the  Lay  Brothers  work  upon  their 
land,  planting  parsnips  in  rows,  or  tending  a 
prosperous  bee-farm.  A  young  friar,  who 
sang  the  High  Mass  yesterday,  is  gaily  hang- 
ing the  washed  linen  in  the  sun.  A  print- 
ing press,  and  a  machine  which  slices  turnips, 
are  at  work  in  an  outhouse,  and  the  yard 
thereby  is  guarded  by  a  St  Bernard,  whose 


AT  MONASTERY  GATES  35 


single  evil  deed  was  that  under  one  of  the 
obscure  impulses  of  a  dog's  heart — atoned 
for  by  long  and  self-conscious  remorse — he 
bit  the  poet ;  and  tried^  says  one  of  the 
friars^  to  make  doggerel  of  him.  The  poet, 
too,  lives  at  the  monastery  gates,  and  on 
monastery  ground,  in  a  seclusion  which  the 
tidings  of  the  sequence  of  his  editions  hardly 
reaches.  There  is  no  disturbing  renown  to 
be  got  among  the  cabins  of  the  Flintshire 
hills.  Homeward,  over  the  verge,  from  other 
valleys,  his  light  figure  flits  at  nightfall,  like 
a  moth. 

To  the  coming  and  going  of  the  friars,  too, 
the  village  people  have  become  well  used, 
and  the  infrequent  excursionists,  for  lack  of 
intelligence  and  of  any  knowledge  that  would 
refer  to  history,  look  at  them  without  ob- 
trusive curiosity  It  was  only  from  a  Salva- 
tion Army  girl  that  you  heard  the  brutal 
word  of  contempt.  She  had  come  to  the 
place  with  some  companions,  and  with  them 
was  trespassing,  as  she  was  welcome  to  do, 
within  the  monastery  grounds.  She  stood, 
a  figure  for  Bournemouth  pier,  in  her 
grotesque  bonnet,  and  watched  the  son  of 
the    Umbrian  saint — the    friar  who  walks 


36         AT  MONASTERY  GATES 


among  the  Giotto  frescoes  at  Assisi  and 
between  the  cypresses  of  Bello  Sguardo^  and 
has  paced  the  centuries  continually  since  the 
coming  of  the  friars.  One  might  have  asked 
of  her  the  kindness  of  a  fellow-feeling.  She 
and  he  alike  were  so  habited  as  to  show  the 
world  that  their  life  was  aloof  from  its  ^'idle 
business.*'  By  some  such  phrase,  at  least, 
the  friar  would  assuredly  have  attempted  to 
include  her  in  any  spiritual  honours  ascribed 
to  him.  Or  one  might  have  asked  of  her 
the  condescension  of  forbearance.  Only 
fancy,"  said  the  Salvation  Army  girl,  watch- 
ing the  friar  out  of  sight,  only  fancy  making 
such  a  fool  of  one's  self!" 

The  great  hood  of  the  friars,  which  is 
drawn  over  the  head  in  Zurbaran's  ecstatic 
picture,  is  turned  to  use  when  the  friars  are 
busy.  As  a  pocket  it  relieves  the  over- 
burdened hands.  A  bottle  of  the  local  white 
wine,  made  by  the  brotherhood  at  Genoa, 
and  sent  to  this  house  by  the  West,  is 
carried  in  the  cowl  as  a  present  to  the 
stranger  at  the  gates.  The  friars  tell  how 
a  brother  resolved,  at  Shrovetide,  to  make 
pancakes,  and  not  only  to  make,  but  also 
to  toss  them.    Those  who  chanced  to  be  in 


AT  MONASTERY  GATES  37 


the  room  stood  prudently  aside,  and  the 
brother  tossed  boldly.  But  that  was  the  last 
that  was  seen  of  his  handiwork.  Victor 
Hugo  sings  in  La  Legende  des  Siecles  of 
disappearance  as  the  thing  which  no  creature 
is  able  to  achieve :  here  the  impossibility 
seemed  to  be  accomplished  by  quite  an 
ordinary  and  a  simple  pancake.  It  was  clean 
gone,  and  there  was  an  end  of  it.  Nor 
could  any  explanation  of  this  ceasing  of  a 
pancake  from  the  midst  of  the  visible  world 
be  so  much  as  divined  by  the  spectators.  It 
was  only  when  the  brother,  in  church,  knelt 
down  to  meditate  and  drew  his  cowl  about 
his  head  that  the  accident  was  explained. 

Every  midnight  the  sweet  contralto  bells 
call  the  community,  who  get  up  gaily  to  this 
difficult  service.  Of  all  duties  this  one  never 
grows  easy  or  familiar,  and  therefore  never 
habitual.  It  is  something  to  have  found  but 
one  act  aloof  from  habit.  It  is  not  merely 
that  the  friars  overcome  the  habit  of  sleep. 
The  subtler  point  is  that  they  can  never 
acquire  the  habit  of  sacrificing  sleep.  What 
art,  what  literature,  or  what  life  but  would 
gain  a  secret  security  by  such  a  point  of 
perpetual  freshness  and  perpetual  initiative? 


38         AT  MONASTERY  GATES 


It  is  not  possible  to  get  up  at  midnight 
without  a  will  that  is  new  night  by  night. 
So  should  the  writer  s  work  be  done^  and, 
with  an  intention  perpetually  unique,  the 
poet's. 

The  contralto  bells  have  taught  these 
Western  hills  the  Angelus  "  of  the  French 
fields,  and  the  hour  of  night — Vora  di  notte 
— which  rings  with  so  melancholy  a  note 
from  the  village  belfries  on  the  Adriatic 
littoral,  when  the  latest  light  is  passing.  It 
is  the  prayer  for  the  dead :  "  Out  of  the 
depths  have  I  cried  unto  Thee,  O  Lord." 

The  little  flocks  of  novices,  on  paschal 
evenings,  are  folded  to  the  sound  of  that 
evening  prayer.  The  care  of  them  is  the 
central  work  of  the  monastery,  which  is 
placed  in  so  remote  a  country  because  it  is 
principally  a  place  of  studies.  So  much 
elect  intellect  and  strength  of  heart  with- 
drawn from  the  traffic  of  the  world!  True, 
the  friars  are  not  doing  the  task  which 
Carlyle  set  mankind  as  a  refuge  from  de- 
spair. These  "bearded  counsellors  of  God" 
keep  their  cells,  read,  study,  suffer,  sing,  hold 
silence;  whereas  they  might  be  "operating" 
— ^beautiful  word  ! — upon  the  Stock  Exchange, 


AT  MONASTERY  GATES  39 


or  painting  Academy  pictures^  or  making 
speeches^  or  reluctantly  jostling  other  men 
for  places.  They  might  be  among  the  in- 
voluntary busybodies  who  are  living  by  futile 
tasks  the  need  whereof  is  a  discouraged 
fiction.  There  is  absolutely  no  limit  to  the 
superfluous  activities^  to  the  art^  to  the  litera- 
ture, implicitly  renounced  by  the  dwellers 
within  such  walls  as  these.  The  output — 
again  a  beautiful  word — of  the  age  is  lessened 
by  this  abstention.  None  the  less  hopes  the 
stranger  and  pilgrim  to  pause  and  knock  once 
again  upon  those  monastery  gates. 


RUSHES  AND  REEDS 


ALLER  than  the  grass  and  lower 
than  the  trees^  there  is  another 
growth  that  feels  the  implicit 
spring.  It  had  been  more  aban- 
doned to  winter  than  even  the  short  grass 
shuddering  under  a  wave  of  east  wind,  more 
than  the  dumb  trees.  For  the  multitudes  of 
sedges,  rushes,  canes,  and  reeds  were  the 
appropriate  lyre  of  the  cold.  On  them  the 
nimble  winds  played  their  dry  music.  They 
were  part  of  the  winter.  It  looked  through 
them  and  spoke  through  them.  They  were 
spears  and  javelins  in  array  to  the  sound  of 
the  drums  of  the  north. 

The  winter  takes  fuller  possession  of  these 
things  than  of  those  that  stand  solid.  The 
sedges  whistle  his  tune.  They  let  the  colour 
of  his  light  look  through — low-flying  arrows 
and  bright  bayonets  of  winter  day. 

The  multitudes  of  all   reeds  and  rushes 
40 


RUSHES  AND  REEDS  41 


grow  out  of  bounds.  They  belong  to  the 
margins  of  lands^  the  space  between  the 
farms  and  the  river,  beyond  the  pastures, 
and  where  the  marsh  in  flower  becomes 
perilous  footing  for  the  cattle.  They  are 
the  fringe  of  the  low  lands,  the  sign  of 
streams.  They  grow  tall  between  you  and  the 
near  horizon  of  flat  lands.  They  etch  their 
sharp  lines  upon  the  sky ;  and  near  them 
grow  flowers  of  stature,  including  the  lofty 
yellow  lily. 

Our  green  country  is  the  better  for  the 
grey,  soft,  cloudy  darkness  of  the  sedge,  and 
our  full  landscape  is  the  better  for  the  dis- 
tinction of  its  points,  its  needles,  and  its 
resolute  right  lines. 

Ours  is  a  summer  full  of  voices,  and  there- 
fore it  does  not  so  need  the  sound  of  rushes ; 
but  they  are  most  sensitive  to  the  stealthy 
breezes,  and  betray  the  passing  of  a  wind 
that  even  the  tree-tops  knew  not  of.  Some- 
times it  is  a  breeze  unfelt,  but  the  stiff 
sedges  whisper  it  along  a  mile  of  marsh. 
To  the  strong  wind  they  bend,  showing  the 
silver  of  their  sombre  little  tassels  as  fish 
show  the  silver  of  their  sides  turning  in  the 
pathless  sea.    They  are  unanimous.    A  field 


42  RUSHES  AND  REEDS 


of  tall  flowers  tosses  many  ways  in  one  warm 
gale,  like  the  many  lovers  of  a  poet  who 
have  a  thousand  reasons  for  their  love ;  but 
the  rushes,  more  strongly  tethered,  are  swept 
into  a  single  attitude,  again  and  again,  at 
every  renewal  of  the  storm. 

Between  the  pasture  and  the  wave,  the 
many  miles  of  rushes  and  reeds  in  England 
seem  to  escape  that  insistent  ownership 
which  has  so  changed  (except  for  a  few 
forests  and  downs)  the  aspect  of  England, 
and  has  in  fact  made  the  landscape.  Culti- 
vation makes  the  landscape  elsewhere,  rather 
than  ownership,  for  the  boundaries  in  the 
south  are  not  conspicuous;  but  here  it  is 
ownership.  But  the  rushes  are  a  gipsy 
people,  amongst  us,  yet  out  of  reach.  The 
landowner,  if  he  is  rather  a  gross  man, 
believes  these  races  of  reeds  are  his.  But 
if  he  is  a  man  of  sensibility,  depend  upon 
it  he  has  his  interior  doubts.  His  property, 
he  says,  goes  right  down  to  the  centre  of 
the  earth,  in  the  shape  of  a  wedge;  how 
high  up  it  goes  into  the  air  it  would  be 
difficult  to  say,  and  obviously  the  shape  of 
the  wedge  must  be  continued  in  the  direc- 
tion of  increase.     We   may   therefore  pro- 


RUSHES  AND  REEDS  43 


claim  his  right  to  the  clouds  and  their  cargo. 
It  is  true  that  as  his  ground  game  is  apt  to 
go  upon  his  neighbour's  land  to  be  shot,  so 
the  clouds  may  now  and  then  spend  his 
showers  elsewhere.  But  the  great  thing  is 
the  view.  A  well-appointed  country-house 
sees  nothing  out  of  the  windows  that  is  not 
its  own.  But  he  who  tells  you  so,  and 
proves  it  to  you  by  his  own  view,  is  certainly 
disturbed  by  an  unspoken  doubt,  if  his  other- 
wise contented  eyes  should  happen  to  be 
caught  by  a  region  of  rushes.  The  water  is 
his — he  had  the  pond  made ;  or  the  river, 
for  a  space,  and  the  fish,  for  a  time.  But 
the  bulrushes,  the  reeds!  One  wonders 
whether  a  very  thorough  landowner,  but  a 
sensitive  one,  ever  resolved  that  he  would 
endure  this  sort  of  thing  no  longer,  and 
werit  out  armed  and  had  a  long  acre  of 
sedges  scythed  to  death. 

They  are  probably  outlaws.  They  are 
dwellers  upon  thresholds  and  upon  margins, 
as  the  gipsies  make  a  home  upon  the  green 
edges  of  a  road.  No  wild  flowers,  however 
wild,  are  rebels.  The  copses  and  their  prim- 
roses are  good  subjects,  the  oaks  are  loyal. 
Now  and  then,  though,  one  has  a  kind  of 


44  RUSHES  AND  REEDS 


suspicion  of  some  of  the  other  kinds  of  trees 
— the  Corot  trees.  Standing  at  a  distance 
from  the  more  ornamental  trees,  from  those 
of  fuller  foliage,  and  from  all  the  indeciduous 
shrubs  and  the  conifers  (manifest  property, 
every  one),  two  or  three  translucent  aspens, 
with  which  the  very  sun  and  the  breath  of 
earth  are  entangled,  have  sometimes  seemed 
to  wear  a  certain  look — an  extra-territorial 
look,  let  us  call  it.  They  are  suspect.  One 
is  inclined  to  shake  a  doubtful  head  at  them. 

And  the  landowner  feels  it.  He  knows 
quite  well,  though  he  may  not  say  so,  that 
the  Corot  trees,  though  they  do  not  dwell 
upon  margins,  are  in  spirit  almost  as  extra- 
territorial as  the  rushes.  In  proof  of  this 
he  very  often  cuts  them  down,  out  of  the 
view,  once  for  all.  The  view  is  better,  as  a 
view,  without  them.  Though  their  roots  are 
in  his  ground  right  enough,  there  is  a  some- 
thing about  their  heads  .    But  the  reason 

he  gives  for  wishing  them  away  is  merely 
that  they  are  "thin."  A  man  does  not 
always  say  everything. 


ELEONORA  DUSE 


HE  Italian  woman  is  very  near  to 
Nature  ;  so  is  true  drama. 


Acting  is  not  to  be  judged  like 
some  other  of  the  arts^  and  praised 


for  a  noble  convention."  Paintings  indeed, 
is  not  praised  amiss  vrith  that  word;  painting 
is  obviously  an  art  that  exists  by  its  conven- 
tion— the  convention  is  the  art.  But  far  other- 
wise is  it  with  the  art  of  acting,  where  there 
is  no  representative  material ;  where,  that 
is,  the  man  is  his  own  material,  and  there  is 
nothing  between.  With  the  actor  the  style 
is  the  man,  in  another,  a  more  immediate, 
and  a  more  obvious  sense  than  was  ever  in- 
tended by  that  sajdng.  Therefore  we  may 
allow  the  critic — and  not  accuse  him  of  re- 
action— to  speak  of  the  division  between  art 
and  Nature  in  the  painting  of  a  landscape, 
but  we  cannot  let  him  say  the  same  things 
of  acting.  Acting  has  a  technique,  but  no 
convention. 


45 


46  ELEONORA  DUSE 


Once  for  all,  then,  to  say  that  acting  reaches 
the  point  of  Nature,  and  touches  it  quick,  is 
to  say  all.  In  other  arts  imitation  is  more 
or  less  fatuous,  illusion  more  or  less  vulgar. 
But  acting  is,  at  its  less  good,  imitation;  at 
its  best,  illusion ;  at  its  worst,  and  when  it 
ceases  to  be  an  art,  convention. 

But  the  idea  that  acting  is  conventional  has 
inevitably  come  about  in  England.  For  it  is, 
in  fact,  obliged,  with  us,  to  defeat  and  destroy 
itself  by  taking  a  very  full,  entire,  tedious, 
and  impotent  convention ;  a  complete  body 
of  convention ;  a  convention  of  demonstrative- 
ness — of  voice  and  manners  intended  to  be 
expressive,  and,  in  particular,  a  whole  weak 
and  unimpulsive  convention  of  gesture.  The 
English  manners  of  real  life  are  so  negative 
and  still  as  to  present  no  visible  or  audible 
drama ;  and  drama  is  for  hearing  and  for 
vision.  Therefore  our  acting  (granting  that 
we  have  any  acting,  which  is  granting  much) 
has  to  create  its  little  different  and  comple- 
mentary world,  and  to  make  the  division  of 
^^art"  from  Nature — the  division  which,  in 
this  one  art,  is  fatal. 

This  is  one  simple  and  sufficient  reason 
why  we  have  no  considerable  acting ;  though 


ELEONORA  DUSE 


47 


we  may  have  more  or  less  interesting  and 
energetic  or  graceful  conventions  that  pass 
for  art.  But  any  student  of  international 
character  knows  well  enough  that  there  are 
also  supplementary  reasons  of  weight.  For 
example^  it  is  bad  to  make  a  conventional 
world  of  the  stage,  but  it  is  doubly  bad  to 
make  it  badly  —  which,  it  must  be  granted, 
we  do.  When  we  are  anything  of  the  kind, 
we  are  intellectual  rather  than  intelligent ; 
whereas  outward-streaming  intelligence  makes 
the  actor.  We  are  pre-occupied,  and  there- 
fore never  single,  never  wholly  possessed  by 
the  one  thing  at  a  time ;  and  so  forth. 

On  the  other  hand,  Italians  are  expressive. 
They  are  so  possessed  by  the  one  thing  at  a 
time  as  never  to  be  habitual  in  any  lifeless 
sense.  They  have  no  habits  to  overcome  by 
something  arbitrary  and  intentional.  Accord- 
ingly, you  will  find  in  the  open-air  theatre 
of  many  an  Italian  province,  away  from  the 
high  roads,  an  art  of  drama  that  our  capital 
cannot  show,  so  high  is  it,  so  fine,  so  simple, 
so  complete,  so  direct,  so  momentary  and  im- 
passioned, so  full  of  singleness  and  of  multi- 
tudinous impulses  of  passion. 

Signora  Duse  is  not  different  in  kind  from 


48  ELEONORA  DUSE 


these  unrenowned.  What  they  are^  she  is  in 
a  greater  degree.  She  goes  yet  further,  and 
yet  closer.  She  has  an  exceptionally  large 
and  liberal  intelligence.  If  lesser  actors  give 
themselves  entirely  to  the  part,  and  to  the 
large  moment  of  the  part,  she,  giving  herself, 
has  more  to  give. 

Add  to  this  nature  of  hers  that  she  stages 
herself  and  her  acting  with  singular  know- 
ledge and  ease,  and  has  her  technique  so 
thoroughly  as  to  be  able  to  forget  it — for 
this  is  the  one  only  thing  that  is  the  better 
for  habit,  and  ought  to  be  habitual.  There 
is  but  one  passage  of  her  mere  technique  in 
which  she  fails  so  to  slight  it.  It  is  in  the 
long  exchange  of  stove-side  talk  between  Nora 
and  the  other  woman  of  ^^The  Doll's  House.'* 
Signora  Duse  may  have  felt  some  misgivings 
as  to  the  effect  of  a  dialogue  having  so  little 
symmetry,  such  half-hearted  feeling,  and,  in 
a  word,  so  little  visible  or  audible  drama  as 
this.  Needless  to  say,  the  misgiving  is  not 
apparent;  what  is  too  apparent  is  simply  the 
technique.  For  instance,  she  shifts  her  posi- 
tion with  evident  system  and  notable  skill. 
The  whole  conversation  becomes  a  dance  of 
change  and  counterchange  of  place. 


ELEONORA  DUSE  49 


Nowhere  else  does  the  perfect  technical 
habit  lapse,  and  nowhere  at  all  does  the 
habit  of  acting  exist  with  her. 

I  have  spoken  of  this  actress's  nationality 
and  of  her  womanhood  together.  They  are 
inseparable.  Nature  is  the  only  authentic 
art  of  the  stage,  and  the  Italian  woman  is 
natural :  none  other  so  natural  and  so  justi- 
fied by  her  nature  as  Eleonora  Duse ;  but  all, 
as  far  as  their  nature  goes,  natural.  More- 
over, they  are  women  freer  than  other  Euro- 
peans from  the  minor  vanities.  Has  any  one 
yet  fully  understood  how  her  liberty  in  this 
respect  gives  to  the  art  of  Signora  Duse 
room  and  action  ?  Her  countrywomen  have 
no  anxious  vanities,  because,  for  one  reason, 
they  are  generally  ^^sculpturesque,"  and  are 
very  little  altered  by  mere  accidents  of  dress 
or  arrangement.  Such  as  they  are,  they  are  so 
once  for  all;  whereas,  the  turn  of  a  curl 
makes  all  the  difference  with  women  of  less 
grave  physique.    Italians  are  not  uneasy. 

Signora  Duse  has  this  immunity,  but  she 
has  a  far  nobler  deliverance  from  vanities,  in 
her  own  peculiar  distance  and  dignity.  She 
lets  her  beautiful  voice  speak,  unwatched  and 
unchecked,  from  the  very  life  of  the  moment. 

D 


50  ELEONORA  DUSE 


It  runs  up  into  the  high  notes  of  indifference, 
or,  higher  still,  into  those  of  ennui,  as  in 
the  earlier  scenes  of  Divorqons ;  or  it  grows 
sweet  as  summer  with  joy,  or  cracks  and 
breaks  outright,  out  of  all  music,  and  out  of 
all  control.    Passion  breaks  it  so  for  her. 

As  for  her  inarticulate  sounds,  which  are 
the  more  intimate  and  the  truer  words  of  her 
meaning,  they,  too,  are  Italian  and  natural. 
English  women,  for  instance,  do  not  make 
them.  They  are  sounds  a  houche  fermee,  at 
once  private  and  irrepressible.  They  are 
not  demonstrations  intended  for  the  ears  of 
others;  they  are  her  own.  Other  actresses, 
even  English,  and  even  American,  know  how 
to  make  inarticulate  cries,  with  open  mouth ; 
Signora  Duse's  noise  is  not  a  cry ;  it  is  her 
very  thought  audible  —  the  thought  of  the 
woman  she  is  playing,  who  does  not  at  every 
moment  give  exact  words  to  her  thought,  but 
does  give  it  significant  sound. 

When  la  femme  de  Claude  is  trapped  by  the 
man  who  has  come  in  search  of  the  husband's 
secret,  and  when  she  is  obliged  to  sit  and 
listen  to  her  own  evil  history  as  he  tells  it 
her,  she  does  not  interrupt  the  telling  with 
the  outcries  that  might  be  imagined  by  a 


ELEONORA  DUSE  51 


lesser  actress^  she  accompanies  it.  Her  lips 
are  close,  but  her  throat  is  vocal.  None  who 
heard  it  can  forget  the  speech-within-speech 
of  one  of  these  comprehensive  noises.  It  was 
when  the  man  spoke,  for  her  further  confusion, 
of  the  slavery  to  which  she  had  reduced  her 
lovers ;  she  followed  him,  aloof,  with  a  twang 
of  triumph. 

If  Parisians  say,  as  they  do,  that  she  makes 
a  bad  Parisienne,  it  is  because  she  can  be 
too  nearly  a  woman  untamed.  They  have 
accused  her  of  lack  of  elegance  —  in  that 
supper  scene  of  La  Dame  aux  Camelias, 
for  instance;  taking  for  ill -breeding,  in  her 
Marguerite,  that  which  is  Italian  merely 
and  simple.  Whether,  again,  Cyprienne,  in 
Divorqonsy  can  at  all  be  considered  a  lady 
may  be  a  question ;  but  this  is  quite  un- 
questionable— that  she  is  rather  more  a  lady, 
and  not  less,  when  Signora  Duse  makes  her 
a  savage.  But  really  the  result  is  not  at 
all  Parisian. 

It  seems  possible  that  the  French  sense 
does  not  well  distinguish,  and  has  no  fine 
perception  of  that  affinity  with  the  peasant 
which  remains  with  the  great  ladies  of  the 
old  civilisation  of  Italy,  and  has  so  long  dis- 


LIBRARY 


52  ELEONORA  DUSE 


appeared  from  those  of  the  younger  civilisa- 
tions of  France  and  England — a  paradox.  The 
peasant's  gravity^  directness^  and  carelessness 
— a  kind  of  uncouthness  which  is  neither 
graceless  nor^  in  any  intolerable  English  sense^ 
vulgar — are  to  be  found  in  the  unceremonious 
moments  of  every  cisalpine  woman^  however 
elect  her  birth  and  select  her  conditions. 
In  Italy  the  lady  is  not  a  creature  described 
by  negatives,  as  an  author  who  is  always 
right  has  defined  the  lady  to  be  in  England. 
Even  in  France  she  is  not  that,  and  between 
the  Frenchwoman  and  the  Italian  there  are 
the  Alps.  In  a  word,  the  educated  Italian 
mondaine  is,  in  the  sense  (also  untranslatable) 
of  singular,  insular,  and  absolutely  British 
usage,  a  Native.  None  the  less  would  she 
be  surprised  to  find  herself  accused  of  a  lack 
of  dignity. 

As  to  intelligence — a  little  intelligence  is 
sufficiently  dramatic,  if  it  is  single.  A  child 
doing  one  thing  at  a  time  and  doing  it  com- 
pletely, produces  to  the  eye  a  better  impres- 
sion of  mental  life  than  one  receives  from — 
well,  from  a  lecturer. 


DONKEY  RACES 


NGLISH  acting  had  for  some  time 
past  still  been  making  a  feint  of 
running  the  race  that  wins.  The 
retort,  the  interruption,  the  call, 
the  reply,  the  surprise,  had  yet  kept  a  spoilt 
tradition  of  suddenness  and  life.  You  had, 
indeed,  to  wait  for  an  interruption  in  dialogue 
— it  is  true  you  had  to  wait  for  it;  so  had 
the  interrupted  speaker  on  the  stage.  But 
when  the  interruption  came,  it  had  still  a 
false  air  of  vivacity ;  and  the  waiting  of  the 
interrupted  one  was  so  ill  done,  with  so  roving 
an  eye  and  such  an  arrest  and  failure  of  con- 
vention, such  a  confession  of  a  blank,  as  to 
prove  that  there  remained  a  kind  of  reluctant 
and  inexpert  sense  of  movement.  It  still 
seemed  as  though  the  actor  and  the  actress 
acknowledged  some  forward  tendency. 

Not  so  now.  The  serious  stage  is  openly 
the  scene  of  the  race  that  loses.    The  donkey 

53 


54  DONKEY  RACES 


race  is  candidly  the  model  of  the  talk  in 
every  tragedy  that  has  a  chance  of  popular 
success.  Who  shall  be  last?  The  hands  of 
the  public  are  for  him^  or  for  her.  A  certain 
actress  who  has  ^^come  to  the  front  of  her 
profession"  holds^  for  a  time^  the  record  of 
delay.  "Come  to  the  front,"  do  they  say.?* 
Surely  the  front  of  her  profession  must  have 
moved  in  retreat,  to  gain  upon  her  tardiness. 
It  must  have  become  the  back  of  her  pro- 
fession before  ever  it  came  up  with  her. 

It  should  rejoice  those  who  enter  for  this 
kind  of  racing  that  the  record  need  never 
finally  be  beaten.  The  possibilities  of  suc- 
cess are  incalculable.  The  play  has  perforce 
to  be  finished  in  a  night,  it  is  true,  but  the 
minor  characters,  the  subordinate  actors,  can 
be  made  to  bear  the  burden  of  that  necessity. 
The  principals,  or  those  who  have  come  "to 
the  front  of  their  profession,"  have  an  almost 
unlimited  opportunity  and  liberty  of  lagging. 

Besides,  the  competitor  in  a  donkey  race 
is  not,  let  it  be  borne  in  mind,  limited  to 
the  practice  of  his  own  tediousness.  Part  of 
his  victory  is  to  be  ascribed  to  his  influence 
upon  others.  It  may  be  that  a  determined 
actor — a  man  of  more  than  common  strength 


DONKEY  RACES  55 


of  will  —  may  so  cause  his  colleague  to  get 
on  (let  us  say  "get  on,"  for  everything  in 
this  world  is  relative) ;  may  so,  then,  compel 
the  other  actor,  with  whom  he  is  in  conver- 
sation, to  get  on,  as  to  secure  his  own  final 
triumph  by  indirect  means  as  well  as  by  direct. 
To  be  plain,  for  the  sake  of  those  unfamiliar 
with  the  sports  of  the  village,  the  rider  in  a 
donkey  race  may,  and  does,  cudgel  the  moimts 
of  his  rivals. 

Consider,  therefore,  how  encouraging  the 
prospect  really  is.  The  individual  actor  may 
fail  —  in  fact,  he  must.  Where  two  people 
ride  together  on  horseback,  the  married  have 
ever  been  warned,  one  must  ride  behind. 
And  when  two  people  are  speaking  slowly 
one  must  needs  be  the  slowest.  Comparative 
success  implies  the  comparative  failure.  But 
where  this  actor  or  that  actress  fails,  the 
great  cause  of  slowness  profits,  obviously. 
The  record  is  advanced.  Pshaw !  the  word 
"advanced"  comes  unadvised  to  the  pen.  It 
is  difficult  to  remember  in  what  a  fatuous 
theatrical  Royal  Presence  one  is  doing  this 
criticism,  and  how  one's  words  should  go 
backwards,  without  exception,  in  homage  to 
this  symbol  of  a  throne. 


56  DONKEY  RACES 


It  is  not  long  since  there  took  place  upon 
the  principal  stage  in  London  the  most  im- 
portant event  in  donkey-racing  ever  known 
until  that  first  night.  A  tragedian  and  a 
secondary  actor  of  renown  had  a  duet  to- 
gether. It  was  in  ^^The  Dead  Heart."  No 
one  who  heard  it  can  possibly  have  yet  for- 
gotten it.  The  two  men  used  echoes  of  one 
another's  voice^  then  outpaused  each  other. 
It  was  a  contest  so  determined^  so  unrelaxed^ 
so  deadly,  so  inveterate  that  you  might  have 
slept  between  its  encounters.  You  did  sleep. 
These  men  were  strong  men,  and  knew  what 
they  wanted.  It  is  tremendous  to  watch  the 
struggle  of  such  resolves.  They  had  their 
purpose  in  their  grasp,  their  teeth  were  set, 
their  will  was  iron.    They  were  foot  to  foot. 

And  next  morning  you  saw  by  the  papers 
that  the  secondary,  but  still  renowned,  actor, 
had  succeeded  in  sharing  the  principal  honours 
of  the  piece.  So  uncommonly  well  had  he 
done,  even  for  him.  Then  you  understood 
that,  though  you  had  not  known  it,  the 
tragedian  must  have  been  beaten  in  that 
dialogue.  He  had  suffered  himself  in  an 
instant  of  weakness,  to  be  stimulated;  he 
had  for  a  moment — only  a  moment — got  on. 


DONKEY  RACES  57 


That  night  was  influential.  We  may  see  its 
results  everywhere,  and  especially  in  Shake- 
speare. Our  tragic  stage  was  always — ^well, 
different,  let  us  say — different  from  the  tragic 
stage  of  Italy  and  France.  It  is  now  quite 
unlike,  and  frankly  so.  The  spoilt  tradition  ol 
vitality  has  been  explicitly  abandoned.  The 
interrupted  one  waits,  no  longer  with  a  rov- 
ing eye,  but  with  something  almost  of  dig- 
nity, as  though  he  were  fulfilling  ritual. 

Benvolio  and  Mercutio  outlag  one  another 
in  hunting  after  the  leaping  Romeo.  They 
call  without  the  slightest  impetus.  One  can 
imagine  how  the  true  Mercutio  called — cer- 
tainly not  by  rote.  There  must  have  been 
pauses  indeed,  brief  and  short-breath' d  pauses 
of  listening  for  an  answer,  between  every 
nickname.  But  the  nicknames  were  quick 
work.  At  the  Lyceum  they  were  quite  an 
effort  of  memory  :  Romeo  !  Humours  !  Mad- 
man !  Passion  !  Lover  ! 

The  actress  of  Juliet,  speaking  the  words 
of  haste,  makes  her  audience  wait  to  hear 
them.  Nothing  more  incongruous  than  Juliet's 
hurry  of  phrase  and  the  actress's  leisure  of 
phrasing.  None  act,  none  speak,  as  though 
there  were  such  a  thing  as  impulse  in  a  play. 


58 


DONKEY  RACES 


To  drop  behind  is  the  only  idea  of  arriving. 
The  nurse  ceases  to  be  absurd,  for  there  is 
no  one  readier  with  a  reply  than  she.  Or, 
rather,  her  delays  are  so  altered  by  exagger- 
ation as  to  lose  touch  with  Nature.  If  it  is 
ill  enough  to  hear  haste  drawled  out,  it  is  ill, 
too,  to  hear  slowness  out-tarried.  The  true 
nurse  of  Shakespeare  lags  with  her  news  be- 
cause her  ignorant  wits  are  easily  astray,  as 
lightly  caught  as  though  they  were  light, 
which  they  are  not ;  but  the  nurse  of  the 
stage  is  never  simply  astray :  she  knows  before- 
hand how  long  she  means  to  be,  and  never, 
never  forgets  what  kind  of  race  is  the  race  she 
is  riding.  The  Juliet  of  the  stage  seems  to 
consider  that  there  is  plenty  of  time  for  her  to 
discover  which  is  slain — Tybalt  or  her  husband ; 
she  is  sure  to  know  some  time ;  it  can  wait. 

A  London  success,  when  you  know  where 
it  lies,  is  not  difficult  to  achieve.  Of  all  things 
that  can  be  gained  by  men  or  women  about 
their  business,  there  is  one  thing  that  can  be 
gained  without  fear  of  failure.  This  is  time. 
To  gain  time  requires  so  little  wit  that,  except 
for  competition,  every  one  could  be  first  at 
the  game.  In  fact,  time  gains  itself.  The 
actor  is  really  not  called  upon  to  do  anything. 


DONKEY  RACES  59 


There  is  nothing,  accordingly,  for  which  our 
actors  and  actresses  do  not  rely  upon  time. 
For  humour  even,  when  the  humour  occurs 
in  tragedy,  they  appeal  to  time.  They  give 
blanks  to  their  audiences  to  be  filled  up. 

It  might  be  possible  to  have  tragedies 
written  from  beginning  to  end  for  the  ser- 
vice of  the  present  kind  of  "art."  But  the 
tragedies  we  have  are  not  so  written.  And 
being  what  they  are,  it  is  not  vivacity  that 
they  lose  by  this  length  of  pause,  this  length 
of  phrasing,  this  illimitable  tiresomeness ;  it  is 
life  itself.  For  the  life  of  a  scene  conceived 
directly  is  its  directness ;  the  life  of  a  scene 
created  simply  is  its  simplicity.  And  sim- 
plicity, directness,  impetus,  emotion,  nature 
fall  out  of  the  trailing,  loose,  long  dialogue, 
like  fish  from  the  loose  meshes  of  a  net — 
they  fall  out,  they  drift  off,  they  are  lost. 

The  universal  slowness,  moreover,  is  not 
good  for  metre.  Even  when  an  actress  speaks 
her  lines  as  lines,  and  does  not  drop  into 
prose  by  slipping  here  and  there  a  syllable, 
she  spoils  the  tempo  by  inordinate  length  of 
pronunciation.  Verse  cannot  keep  upon  the 
wing  without  a  certain  measure  in  the  move- 
ment of  the  pinion.    Verse  is  a  flight. 


GRASS 


OW  and  then,  at  regular  intervals  of 
the  summer,  the  Suburb  springs  for 
a  time  from  its  mediocrity ;  but  an 
inattentive  eye  might  not  see  why, 
or  might  not  seize  the  cause  of  the  bloom  and 
of  the  new  look  of  humility  and  dignity  that 
makes  the  Road,  the  Rise,  and  the  Villas  seem 
suddenly  gentle,  gay  and  rather  shy. 

It  is  no  change  in  the  gardens.  These  are, 
as  usual,  full,  abundant,  fragrant,  and  quite  un- 
interesting, keeping  the  traditional  secret  by 
which  the  suburban  rose,  magnolia,  clematis, 
and  all  other  flowers  grow  dull — not  in  colour, 
but  in  spirit — between  the  yellow  brick  house- 
front  and  the  iron  railings.  Nor  is  there  any- 
thing altered  for  the  better  in  the  houses 
themselves. 

Nevertheless,  the  little,  common,  prosperous 
road,  has  bloomed,  you  cannot  tell  how.    It  is 
unexpectedly  liberal,  fresh,  and  innocent.  The 
60 


GRASS 


61 


soft  garden-winds  that  rustle  its  shrubs  are^ 
for  the  moment^  genuine. 

Another  day  and  all  is  undone.  The  Rise 
is  its  daily  self  again — a  road  of  flowers  and 
foHage  that  is  less  pleasant  than  a  fairly  well- 
built  street.  And  if  you  happen  to  find  the 
men  at  work  on  the  re-transformation^  you 
become  aware  of  the  accident  that  made  all 
this  difference.  It  lay  in  the  little  border  of 
wayside  grass  which  a  row  of  public  servants — 
men  with  spades  and  a  cart — are  in  the  act 
of  tidying  up.  Their  way  of  tidying  it  up  is 
to  lay  its  little  corpse  all  along  the  suburban 
roadside^  and  then  to  carry  it  away  to  some 
parochial  dust-heap. 

But  for  the  vigilance  of  Vestries^  grass  would 
reconcile  everything.  When  the  first  heat  of 
the  summer  was  over^  a  few  nights  of  rain 
altered  all  the  colour  of  the  world.  It  had 
been  the  brown  and  russet  of  drought — very 
beautiful  in  landscape,  but  lifeless ;  it  became 
a  translucent,  profound,  and  eager  green.  The 
citizen  does  not  spend  attention  on  it. 

Why,  then,  is  his  vestry  so  alert,  so  appre- 
hensive, so  swift;  in  perception  so  instant,  in 
execution  so  prompt,  so  silent  in  action,  so 
punctual  in  destruction.?*    The  vestry  keeps, 


62 


GRASS 


as  it  were,  a  tryst  with  the  grass.  The  "  sunny 
spots  of  greenery  "  are  given  just  time  enough 
to  grow  and  be  conspicuous,  and  the  barrow  is 
there,  true  to  time,  and  the  spade.  (To  call 
that  spade  a  spade  hardly  seems  enough.) 
(  For  the  gracious  grass  of  the  summer  has 
not  been  content  within  enclosures.  It  has — 
or  would  have — cheered  up  and  sweetened 
everything.  Over  asphalte  it  could  not  pre- 
vail, and  it  has  prettily  yielded  to  asphalte, 
taking  leave  to  live  and  let  live.  It  has  taken 
the  little  strip  of  ground  next  to  the  asphalte, 
between  this  and  the  kerb,  and  again  the 
refuse  of  ground  between  the  kerb  and  the 
roadway.  The  man  of  business  walking  to  the 
station  with  a  bag  could  have  his  asphalte 
all  unbroken,  and  the  butcher's  boy  in  his 
cart  was  not  annoyed.  The  grass  seemed  to 
respect  everybody's  views,  and  to  take  only 
what  nobody  wanted.  But  these  gay  and 
lowly  ways  will  not  escape  a  vestry. 

There  is  no  wall  so  impregnable  or  so  vulgar, 
but  a  summer's  grass  will  attempt  it.  It  vrill 
try  to  persuade  the  yellow  brick,  to  win  the 
purple  slate,  to  reconcile  stucco.  Outside  the 
authority  of  the  suburbs  it  has  put  a  luminous 
touch  everywhere.     The  thatch  of  cottages 


GRASS 


63 


has  given  it  an  opportunity.  It  has  perched 
and  alighted  in  showers  and  flocks.  It  has 
crept  and  crawled,  and  stolen  its  hour.  It  has 
made  haste  between  the  ruts  of  cart  wheels, 
so  they  were  not  too  frequent.  It  has  been 
stealthy  in  a  good  cause,  and  bold  out  of  reach. 
It  has  been  the  most  defiant  runaway,  and  the 
meekest  lingerer.  It  has  been  universal,  ready 
and  potential  in  every  place,  so  that  the  happy 
country — village  and  field  alike — has  been  all 
grass,  with  mere  exceptions. 

And  all  this  the  grass  does  in  spite  of  the  ill- 
treatment  it  suffers  at  the  hands,  and  mowing- 
machines,  and  vestries  of  man.  His  ideal  of 
grass  is  growth  that  shall  never  be  allowed 
to  come  to  its  flower  and  completion.  He 
proves  this  in  his  lawns.  Not  only  does  he  cut 
the  coming  grass-flower  off  by  the  stalk,  but 
he  does  not  allow  the  mere  leaf — the  blade — to 
perfect  itself.  He  will  not  have  it  a  blade'* 
at  all ;  he  cuts  its  top  away  as  never  sword  or 
sabre  was  shaped.  All  the  beauty  of  a  blade 
of  grass  is  that  the  organic  shape  has  the  inten- 
tion of  ending  in  a  point.  Surely  no  one  at 
all  aware  of  the  beauty  of  lines  ought  to  be 
ignorant  of  the  significance  and  grace  of  mani- 
fest intention^  which  rules  a  living  line  from 


64 


GRASS 


its  beginning,  even  though  the  intention  be 
towards  a  point  while  the  first  spring  of  the 
line  is  towards  an  opening  curve.  But  man 
does  not  care  for  intention ;  he  mows  it.  Nor 
does  he  care  for  attitude ;  he  rolls  it.  In  a 
word,  he  proves  to  the  grass,  as  plainly  as 
deeds  can  do  so,  that  it  is  not  to  his  mind. 
The  rolling,  especially,  seems  to  be  a  violent 
way  of  showing  that  the  universal  grass 
interrupted  by  the  life  of  the  Englishman 
is  not  as  he  would  have  it.  Besides,  when 
he  wishes  to  deride  a  city,  he  calls  it  grass- 
grown. 

But  his  suburbs  shall  not,  if  he  can  help 
it,  be  grass-grown.  They  shall  not  be  like 
a  mere  Pisa.  Highgate  shall  not  so,  nor 
Peckham. 


A  WOMAN  IN  GREY 


HE  mothers  of  Professors  were  in- 
dulged in  the  practice  of  jumping 
at  conclusions,  and  were  praised 
for  their  impatience  of  the  slow 
process  of  reason. 

Professors  have  written  of  the  mental  habits 
of  women  as  though  they  accumulated  gener- 
ation by  generation  upon  women,  and  passed 
over  their  sons.  Professors  take  it  for  granted, 
obviously  by  some  process  other  than  the 
slow  process  of  reason,  that  women  derive 
from  their  mothers  and  grandmothers,  and 
men  from  their  fathers  and  grandfathers. 
This,  for  instance,  was  written  lately  :  This 
power  [it  matters  not  what]  would  be  about 
equal  in  the  two  sexes  but  for  the  influence 
of  heredity,  which  turns  the  scale  in  favour 
of  the  woman,  as  for  long  generations  the 
surroundings  and  conditions  of  life  of  the 
female  sex  have  developed  in  her  a  greater 
E  65 


66  A  WOMAN  IN  GREY 


degree  of  the  power  in  question  than  circum- 
stances have  required  from  men."  "  Long 
generations  "  of  subjection  are,  strangely 
enough,  held  to  excuse  the  timorousness  and 
the  shifts  of  women  to-day.  But  the  world, 
unknowing,  tampers  with  the  courage  of 
its  sons  by  such  a  slovenly  indulgence.  It 
tampers  with  their  intelligence  by  fostering 
the  ignorance  of  women. 

And  yet  Shakespeare  confessed  the  partici- 
pation of  man  and  woman  in  their  common 
heritage.    It  is  Cassius  who  speaks  : 

Have  you  not  love  enough  to  bear  with  me 
When  that  rash  humour  which  my  mother  gave  me 
Makes  me  forgetful?" 

And  Brutus  who  replies  : 

"  Yes,  Cassius,  and  from  henceforth 
When  you  are  over- earnest  with  your  Brutus 
He'll  think  your  mother  chides,  and  leave  you  so." 

Dryden  confessed  it  also  in  his  praises  of 
Anne  Killigrew : 

**  If  by  traduction  came  thy  mind, 
Our  wonder  is  the  less  to  find 
A  soul  so  charming  from  a  stock  so  good. 
Thy  father  was  transfused  into  thy  blood.'* 

The  winning  of  Waterloo  upon  the  Eton 


A  WOMAN  IN  GREY  67 


playgrounds  is  very  well ;  but  there  have 
been  some  other,  and  happily  minor,  fields 
that  were  not  won — that  were  more  or  less 
lost.  Where  did  this  loss  take  place,  if  the 
gains  were  secured  at  football  ?  This  inquiry 
is  not  quite  so  cheerful  as  the  other.  But 
while  the  victories  were  once  going  forward 
in  the  playground,  the  defeats  or  disasters 
were  once  going  forward  in  some  other  place, 
presumably.  And  this  was  surely  the  place 
that  was  not  a  playground,  the  place  where 
the  future  wives  of  the  football  players  were 
sitting  still  while  their  future  husbands  were 
playing  football. 

This  is  the  train  of  thought  that  followed 
the  grey  figure  of  a  woman  on  a  bicycle  in 
Oxford  Street.  She  had  an  enormous  and 
top-heavy  omnibus  at  her  back.  All  the 
things  on  the  near  side  of  the  street — the 
things  going  her  way — were  going  at  different 
paces,  in  two  streams,  overtaking  and  being 
overtaken.  The  tributary  streets  shot  omni- 
buses and  carriages,  cabs  and  carts — some  to 
go  her  own  way,  some  with  an  impetus  that 
carried  them  curving  into  the  other  current, 
and  other  some  making  a  straight  line  right 
across  Oxford  Street  into  the  street  opposite, 


68  A  WOMAN  IN  GREY 


Besides  all  the  unequal  movement^  there 
were  the  stoppings.  It  was  a  delicate  tangle 
to  keep  from  knotting.  The  nerves  of  the 
mouths  of  horses  bore  the  whole  charge  and 
answered  it_,  as  they  do  every  day. 

The  woman  in  grey^  quite  alone^  was 
immediately  dependent  on  no  nerves  but 
her  own^  which  almost  made  her  machine 
sensitive.  But  this  alertness  was  joined  to 
such  perfect  composure  as  no  flutter  of  a 
moment  disturbed.  There  was  the  steadiness 
of  sleep,  and  a  vigilance  more  than  that  of 
an  ordinary  waking. 

At  the  same  time,  the  woman  was  doing 
what  nothing  in  her  youth  could  well  have 
prepared  her  for.  She  must  have  passed  a 
childhood  unlike  the  ordinary  girFs  childhood, 
if  her  steadiness  or  her  alertness  had  ever 
been  educated,  if  she  had  been  rebuked  for 
cowardice,  for  the  egoistic  distrust  of  general 
rules,  or  for  claims  of  exceptional  chances. 
Yet  here  she  was,  trusting  not  only  herself 
but  a  multitude  of  other  people  ;  taking  her 
equal  risk ;  giving  a  watchful  confidence  to 
averages  —  that  last,  perhaps,  her  strangest 
and  greatest  success. 

No  exceptions  were  hers,  no  appeals,  and 


A  WOMAN  IN  GREY 


69 


no  forewarnings.  She  evidently  had  not  in 
her  mind  a  single  phrase,  familiar  to  women, 
made  to  express  no  confidence  except  in 
accidents,  and  to  proclaim  a  prudent  fore- 
sight of  the  less  probable  event.  No  vroman 
could  ride  a  bicycle  along  Oxford  Street 
with  any  such  baggage  as  that  about  her. 

The  woman  in  grey  had  a  watchful  con- 
fidence not  only  in  a  multitude  of  men  but 
in  a  multitude  of  things.  And  it  is  very 
hard  for  any  untrained  human  being  to 
practise  confidence  in  things  in  motion — 
things  full  of  force,  and,  what  is  worse, 
of  forces.  Moreover,  there  is  a  supreme 
difficulty  for  a  mind  accustomed  to  search 
timorously  for  some  little  place  of  insignificant 
rest  on  any  accessible  point  of  stable  equili- 
brium ;  and  that  is  the  difficulty  of  holding 
itself  nimbly  secure  in  an  equilibrium  that 
is  unstable.  Who  can  deny  that  women  are 
generally  used  to  look  about  for  the  little 
stationary  repose  just  described  ?  Whether 
in  intellectual  or  in  spiritual  things,  they  do 
not  often  live  without  it. 

She,  none  the  less,  fled  upon  unstable 
equilibrium,  escaped  upon  it,  depended  upon 
it,  trusted  it,  was  'ware  of  it,  was  on  guard 


70  A  WOMAN  IN  GREY 


against  it^  as  she  sped  amid  her  crowd : 
her  own  unstable  equilibrium,  her  machine's, 
that  of  the  judgment,  the  temper,  the  skill, 
the  perception,  the  strength  of  men  and 
horses. 

She  had  learnt  the  difficult  peace  of  sus- 
pense. She  had  leamt  also  the  lowly  and 
self-denying  faith  in  common  chances.  She 
had  learnt  to  be  content  with  her  share — 
no  more — in  common  security,  and  to  be 
pleased  with  her  part  in  common  hope.  For 
all  this,  it  may  be  repeated,  she  could  have 
had  but  small  preparation.  Yet  no  anxiety 
was  hers,  no  uneasy  distrust  and  disbelief  of 
that  human  thing — an  average  of  life  and 
death. 

To  this  courage  the  woman  in  grey  had 
attained  with  a  spring,  and  she  had  seated 
herself  suddenly  upon  a  place  of  detachment 
between  earth  and  air,  freed  from  the  prin- 
cipal detentions,  weights,  and  embarrassments 
of  the  usual  life  of  fear.  She  had  made 
herself,  as  it  were,  light,  so  as  not  to  dwell 
either  in  security  or  danger,  but  to  pass 
between  them.  She  confessed  difficulty  and 
peril  by  her  delicate  evasions,  and  consented 
to  rest  in  neither.    She  would  not  owe  safety 


A  WOMAN  IN  GREY  71 


to  the  mere  motionlessness  of  a  seat  on  the 
soHd  earthy  but  she  used  gravitation  to  balance 
the  slight  burdens  of  her  wariness  and  her 
confidence.  She  put  aside  all  the  pride  and 
vanity  of  terror,  and  leapt  into  an  unsure 
condition  of  liberty  and  content. 

She  leapt,  too,  into  a  life  of  moments. 
No  pause  was  possible  to  her  as  she  went, 
except  the  vibrating  pause  of  a  perpetual 
change  and  of  an  unflagging  flight.  A  woman, 
long  educated  to  sit  still,  does  not  suddenly 
learn  to  live  a  momentary  life  without  strong 
momentary  resolution.  She  has  no  light 
achievement  in  limiting  not  only  her  fore- 
sight, which  must  become  brief,  but  her 
memory,  which  must  do  more  ;  for  it  must 
rather  cease  than  become  brief.  Idle  memory 
wastes  time  and  other  things.  The  moments 
of  the  woman  in  grey  as  they  dropped  by 
must  needs  disappear,  and  be  simply  forgotten, 
as  a  child  forgets.  Idle  memory,  by  the 
way,  shortens  life,  or  shortens  the  sense  of 
time,  by  linking  the  immediate  past  cling- 
ingly  to  the  present.  Here  may  possibly  be 
found  one  of  the  reasons  for  the  length  of 
a  child's  time,  and  for  the  brevity  of  the 
time    that    succeeds.     The    child  lets  his 


72  A  WOMAN  IN  GREY 


moments  pass  by  and  quickly  become  remote 
through  a  thousand  Httle  successive  obHvions. 
He  has  not  yet  the  languid  habit  of  recall. 

^^Thou  art  my  warrior,"  said  Volumnia.  ^^1 
holp  to  frame  thee." 

Shall  a  man  inherit  his  mother's  trick  of 
speaking,  or  her  habit  and  attitude,  and  not 
suffer  something,  against  his  will,  from  her 
bequest  of  weakness,  and  something,  against 
his  heart,  from  her  bequest  of  folly  ?  From 
the  legacies  of  an  unlessoned  mind,  a  woman's 
heirs-male  are  not  cut  off  in  the  Common 
Law  of  the  generations  of  mankind.  Brutus 
knew  that  the  valour  of  Portia  was  settled 
upon  his  sons. 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


HE  art  of  Japan  has  none  but  an 
exterior  part  in  the  history  of  the 
art  of  nations.  Being  in  its  own 
methods  and  attitude  the  art  of 
accident^  it  has,  appropriately,  an  accidental 
value.  It  is  of  accidental  value,  and  not  of 
integral  necessity.  The  virtual  discovery  of 
Japanese  art,  during  the  later  years  of  the 
second  French  Empire,  caused  Europe  to  re- 
learn  how  expedient,  how  delicate,  and  how 
lovely  Incident  may  look  when  Symmetry  has 
grown  vulgar.  The  lesson  was  most  welcome. 
Japan  has  had  her  full  influence.  European 
art  has  learnt  the  value  of  position  and  the 
tact  'of  the  unique.  But  Japan  is  unlessoned, 
and  (in  all  her  characteristic  art)  content  with 
her  own  conventions ;  she  is  local,  provincial, 
alien,  remote,  incapable  of  equal  companion- 
ship with  a  world  that  has  Greek  art  in  its 
own  history — Pericles  ^^to  its  father." 

73 


74      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


Nor  is  it  pictorial  art,  or  decorative  art  only, 
that  has  been  touched  by  Japanese  example  of 
Incident  and  the  Unique.  Music  had  attained 
the  noblest  form  of  S3rmmetry  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  but  in  music,  too,  symmetry  had  since 
grown  dull ;  and  momentary  music,  the  music  of 
phase  and  of  fragment,  succeeded.  The  sense 
of  symmetry  is  strong  in  a  complete  melody — 
of  symmetry  in  its  most  delicate  and  lively  and 
least  stationary  form — balance ;  whereas  the 
leit-motif  is  isolated.  In  domestic  architecture 
Symmetry  and  Incident  make  a  familiar  anti- 
thesis— the  very  commonplace  of  rival  methods 
of  art.  But  the  same  antithesis  exists  in  less 
obvious  forms.  The  poets  have  sought  ^irre- 
gular" metres.  Incident  hovers,  in  the  very 
act  of  choosing  its  right  place,  in  the  most 
modern  of  modern  portraits.  In  these  we 
have,  if  not  the  Japanese  suppression  of  minor 
emphasis,  certainly  the  Japanese  exaggeration 
of  major  emphasis ;  and  with  this  a  quickness 
and  buoyancy.  The  smile,  the  figure,  the 
drapery — not  yet  settled  from  the  arranging 
touch  of  a  hand,  and  showing  its  mark — the 
restless  and  unstationary  foot,  and  the  unity 
of  impulse  that  has  passed  everywhere  like  a 
single  breeze,  all  these  have  a  life  that  greatly 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  75 


transcends  the  life  of  Japanese  art^  yet  has 
the  nimble  touch  of  Japanese  incident.  In 
passing,  a  charming  comparison  may  be  made 
between  such  portraiture  and  the  aspect  of  an 
aspen  or  other  tree  of  light  and  liberal  leaf; 
whether  still  or  in  motion  the  aspen  and  the 
free-leafed  poplar  have  the  alertness  and  ex- 
pectancy of  flight  in  all  their  flocks  of  leaves, 
while  the  oaks  and  elms  are  gathered  in  their 
station.  All  this  is  not  Japanese,  but  from 
such  accident  is  Japanese  art  inspired,  with  its 
good  luck  of  perceptiveness. 

What  symmetry  is  to  form,  that  is  repetition 
in  the  art  of  ornament.  Greek  art  and  Gothic 
alike  have  series,  with  repetition  or  counter- 
change  for  their  ruling  motive.  It  is  hardly 
necessary  to  draw  the  distinction  between 
this  motive  and  that  of  the  Japanese.  The 
Japanese  motives  may  be  defined  as  unique- 
ness and  position.  And  these  were  not  known 
as  motives  of  decoration  before  the  study  of 
Japanese  decoration.  Repetition  and  counter- 
change,  of  course,  have  their  place  in  Japanese 
ornament,  as  in  the  diaper  patterns  for  which 
these  people  have  so  singular  an  invention, 
but  here,  too,  uniqueness  and  position  are  the 
principal  inspiration.     And  it  is  quite  worth 


76      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


while,  and  much  to  the  present  purpose,  to 
call  attention  to  the  chief  peculiarity  of  the 
Japanese  diaper  patterns,  which  is  interruption. 
Repetition  there  must  necessarily  be  in  these, 
but  symmetry  is  avoided  by  an  interruption 
which  is,  to  the  Western  eye,  at  least,  per- 
petually and  freshly  unexpected.  The  place 
of  the  interruptions  of  lines,  the  variation  of 
the  place,  and  the  avoidance  of  correspond- 
ence, are  precisely  what  makes  Japanese 
design  of  this  class  inimitable.  Thus,  even 
in  a  repeating  pattern,  you  have  a  curiously 
successful  effect  of  impulse.  It  is  as  though 
a  separate  intention  had  been  formed  by  the 
designer  at  every  angle.  Such  renewed  con- 
sciousness does  not  make  for  greatness.  Great- 
ness in  design  has  more  peace  than  is  found  in 
the  gentle  abruptness  of  Japanese  lines,  in 
their  curious  brevity.  It  is  scarcely  necessary 
to  say  that  a  line,  in  all  other  schools  of  art,  is 
long  or  short  according  to  its  place  and  pur- 
pose ;  but  only  the  Japanese  designer  so  con- 
trives his  patterns  that  the  line  is  always 
short ;  and  many  repeating  designs  are  entirely 
composed  of  this  various  and  variously-occur- 
ring brevity,  this  prankish  avoidance  of  the 
goal.     Moreover,  the   Japanese   evade  sym- 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  77 


metry^  in  the  unit  of  their  repeating  patterns^ 
by  another  simple  device — that  of  numbers. 
They  make  a  small  difference  in  the  number 
of  curves  and  of  lines.  A  great  difference 
would  not  make  the  same  effect  of  variety ; 
it  would  look  too  much  like  a  contrast.  For 
example^  three  rods  on  one  side  and  six  on 
another  would  be  something  else  than  a  mere 
variation,  and  variety  would  be  lost  by  the 
use  of  them.  The  Japanese  decorator  will 
vary  three  in  this  place  by  two  in  that,  and 
a  sense  of  the  defeat  of  symmetry  is  imme- 
diately produced.  With  more  violent  means 
the  idea  of  symmetry  would  have  been  neither 
suggested  nor  refuted. 

Leaving  mere  repeating  patterns  and  diaper 
designs,  you  find,  in  Japanese  compositions, 
complete  designs  in  which  there  is  no  point  of 
symmetry.  It  is  a  balance  of  suspension  and 
of  antithesis.  There  is  no  sense  of  lack  of 
equilibrium,  because  place  is,  most  subtly, 
made  to  have  the  effect  of  giving  or  of  sub- 
tracting value.  A  small  thing  is  arranged  to 
reply  to  a  large  one,  for  the  small  thing  is 
placed  at  the  precise  distance  that  makes  it  a 
(Japanese)  equivalent.  In  Italy  (and  perhaps 
in  other  countries)  the  scales  commonly  in 


78      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


use  are  furnished  with  only  a  single  weight 
that  increases  or  diminishes  in  value  accord- 
ing as  you  slide  it  nearer  or  farther  upon  a 
horizontal  arm.  It  is  equivalent  to  so  many 
ounces  when  it  is  close  to  the  upright,  and 
to  so  many  pounds  when  it  hangs  from  the 
farther  end  of  the  horizontal  rod.  Distance 
plays  some  such  part  with  the  twig  or  the 
bird  in  the  upper  corner  of  a  Japanese  com- 
position. Its  place  is  its  significance  and  its 
value.  Such  an  art  of  position  implies  a  great 
art  of  intervals.  The  Japanese  chooses  a  few 
things  and  leaves  the  space  between  them 
free,  as  free  as  the  pauses  or  silences  in 
music.  But  as  time,  not  silence,  is  the  sub- 
ject, or  material,  of  contrast  in  musical  pauses, 
so  it  is  the  measurement  of  space — that  is, 
collocation  —  that  makes  the  value  of  empty 
intervals.  The  space  between  this  form  and 
that,  in  a  Japanese  composition,  is  valuable 
because  it  is  just  so  wide  and  no  more.  And 
this,  again,  is  only  another  way  of  saying  that 
position  is  the  principle  of  this  apparently 
wilful  art. 

Moreover,  the  alien  art  of  Japan,  in  its 
pictorial  form,  has  helped  to  justify  the  more 
stenographic    school    of    etching.  Greatly 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  79 


transcending  Japanese  expression,  the  modern 
etcher  has  undoubtedly  accepted  moral  sup- 
port from  the  islands  of  the  Japanese.  He 
too  etches  a  kind  of  shorthand,  even  though 
his  notes  appeal  much  to  the  spectator's 
knowledge,  while  the  Oriental  shorthand 
appeals  to  nothing  but  the  spectator's  simple 
vision.  Thus  the  two  artists  work  in  ways 
dissimilar.  Nevertheless,  the  French  etcher 
would  never  have  written  his  signs  so  freely 
had  not  the  Japanese  so  freely  drawn  his 
own.  Furthermore  still,  the  transitory  and 
destructible  material  of  Japanese  art  has  done 
as  much  as  the  multiplication  of  newspapers, 
and  the  discovery  of  processes,  to  reconcile 
the  European  designer — the  black  and  white 
artist — to  working  for  the  day,  the  day  of 
publication.  Japan  lives  much  of  its  daily 
hfe  by  means  of  paper,  painted ;  so  does 
Europe  by  means  of  paper,  printed.  But  as 
we,  unlike  those  Orientals,  are  a  destruc- 
tive people,  paper  with  us  means  short  life, 
quick  abolition,  transformation,  re-appearance, 
a  very  circulation  of  life.  This  is  our  present 
way  of  surviving  ourselves — the  new  version 
of  that  feat  of  life.  Time  was  when  to  sur- 
vive yourself  meant  to  secure,  for  a  time  in- 


80      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


definitely  longer  than  the  life  of  man^  such 
dull  form  as  you  had  given  to  your  work ; 
to  intrude  upon  posterity.  To  survive  your- 
self, to-day,  is  to  let  your  work  go  into  daily 
oblivion. 

Now,  though  the  Japanese  are  not  a  de- 
structive people,  their  paper  does  not  last  for 
ever,  and  that  material  has  clearly  suggested 
to  them  a  different  condition  of  ornament  from 
that  with  which  they  adorned  old  lacquer,  fine 
ivory,  or  other  perdurable  things.  For  the 
transitory  material  they  keep  the  more  purely 
pictorial  art  of  landscape.  What  of  Japanese 
landscape  ?  Assuredly  it  is  too  far  reduced  to 
a  monotonous  convention  to  merit  the  serious 
study  of  races  that  have  produced  Cotman  and 
Corot.  Japanese  landscape -drawdng  reduces 
things  seen  to  such  fewness  as  must  have  made 
the  art  insufferably  tedious  to  any  people  less 
fresh-spirited  and  more  inclined  to  take  them- 
selves seriously  than  these  Orientals.  A  pre- 
occupied people  would  never  endure  it.  But 
a  little  closer  attention  from  the  Occidental 
student  might  find  for  their  evasive  attitude 
towards  landscape — it  is  an  attitude  almost 
traitorously  evasive — a  more  significant  reason. 
It  is  that  the  distances,  the  greatness,  the 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  81 


winds  and  the  waves  of  the  worlds  coloured 
plains^  and  the  flight  of  a  sky,  are  all  cer- 
tainly alien  to  the  perceptions  of  a  people 
intent  upon  little  deformities.  Does  it  seem 
harsh  to  define  by  that  phrase  the  curious 
Japanese  search  for  accidents  ?  Upon  such 
search  these  people  are  avowedly  intent_,  even 
though  they  show  themselves  capable  of  ex- 
quisite appreciation  of  the  form  of  a  normal 
bird  and  of  the  habit  of  growth  of  a  normal 
flower.  They  are  not  in  search  of  the  per- 
petual slight  novelty  which  was  Aristotle's 
ideal  of  the  language  poetic  (^^a  little  wildly, 
or  with  the  flower  of  the  mind/'  says  Emerson 
of  the  way  of  a  poet's  speech)  —  and  such 
novelty  it  is,  like  the  frequent  pulse  of  the 
pinion,  that  keeps  verse  upon  the  wing;  no, 
what  the  Japanese  are  intent  upon  is  per- 
petual slight  disorder.  In  Japan  the  man  in 
the  fields  has  eyes  less  for  the  sky  and  the 
crescent  moon  than  for  some  stone  in  the 
path,  of  which  the  asymmetry  strikes  his 
curious  sense  of  pleasure  in  fortunate  acci- 
dent of  form.  For  love  of  a  little  grotesque 
strangeness  he  will  load  himself  with  the 
stone  and  carry  it  home  to  his  garden.  The 
art  of  such  a  people  is  not  liberal  art,  not 

F 


82      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


the  art  of  peace,  and  not  the  art  of  humanity. 
Look  at  the  curls  and  curves  whereby  this 
people  conventionally  signify  wave  or  cloud. 
All  these  curls  have  an  attitude  which  is  like 
that  of  a  figure  slightly  malformed,  and  not 
like  that  of  a  human  body  that  is  perfect, 
dominant,  and  if  bent,  bent  at  no  lowly  or 
niggling  labour.  Why  these  curves  should  be 
so  charming  it  would  be  hard  to  say ;  they 
have  an  exquisite  prankishness  of  variety,  the 
place  where  the  upward  or  downward  scrolls 
curl  off  from  the  main  wave  is  delicately  un- 
expected every  time,  and — especially  in  gold 
embroideries  —  is  sensitively  fit  for  the  ma- 
terial, catching  and  losing  the  light,  while 
the  lengths  of  waving  line  are  such  as  the 
long  gold  threads  take  by  nature. 

A  moment  ago  this  art  was  declared  not 
human.  And,  in  fact,  in  no  other  art  has 
the  figure  suffered  such  crooked  handling. 
The  Japanese  have  generally  evaded  even 
the  local  beauty  of  their  own  race  for  the 
sake  of  perpetual  slight  deformity.  Their 
beauty  is  remote  from  our  sympathy  and 
admiration ;  and  it  is  quite  possible  that  we 
might  miss  it  in  pictorial  presentation,  and 
that  the  Japanese  artist  may  have  intended 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  83 


human  beauty  where  we  do  not  recognise 
it.  But  if  it  is  not  easy  to  recognise^  it  is 
certainly  not  difficult  to  guess  at.  And, 
accordingly,  you  are  generally  aware  that 
the  separate  beauty  of  the  race,  and  its 
separate  dignity,  even — to  be  very  generous 
— has  been  admired  by  the  Japanese  artist, 
and  is  represented  here  and  there  occasionally, 
in  the  figure  of  warrior  or  mousme.  But  even 
with  this  exception  the  habit  of  Japanese 
figure-drawing  is  evidently  grotesque,  derisive, 
and  crooked.  It  is  curious  to  observe  that 
the  search  for  slight  deformity  is  so  constant 
as  to  make  use,  for  its  purposes,  not  of  action 
only,  but  of  perspective  foreshortening.  With 
us  it  is  to  the  youngest  child  only  that  there 
would  appear  to  be  mirth  in  the  drawing  of 
a  man  who,  stooping  violently  forward,  would 
seem  to  have  his  head  beneath  his  shoulders.'* 
The  European  child  would  not  see  fun  in 
the  living  man  so  presented,  but — unused  to 
the  same  effect  ^^in  the  flat'' — he  thinks  it 
prodigiously  humorous  in  a  drawing.  But  so 
only  when  he  is  quite  young.  The  Japanese 
keeps,  apparently,  his  sense  of  this  kind  of 
humour.  It  amuses  him,  but  not  perhaps 
altogether  as  it  amuses  the  child,  that  the 


84      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


foreshortened  figure  should,  in  drawing  and 
to  the  unpractised  eye,  seem  distorted  and 
dislocated ;  the  simple  Oriental  appears  to 
find  more  derision  in  it  than  the  simple 
child.  The  distortion  is  not  without  a 
suggestion  of  ignominy.  And,  moreover,  the 
Japanese  shows  derision,  but  not  precisely 
scorn.  He  does  not  hold  himself  superior  to 
his  hideous  models.  He  makes  free  with 
them  on  equal  terms.  He  is  familiar  with 
them. 

And  if  this  is  the  conviction  gathered  from 
ordinary  drawings,  no  need  to  insist  upon 
the  ignoble  character  of  those  that  are  inten- 
tional caricatures. 

Perhaps  the  time  has  hardly  come  for 
writing  anew  the  praises  of  symmetry.  The 
world  knows  too  much  of  the  abuse  of  Greek 
decoration,  and  would  be  glad  to  forget  it, 
with  the  intention  of  learning  that  art  afresh 
in  a  future  age  and  of  seeing  it  then  anew. 
But  whatever  may  be  the  phases  of  the  arts, 
there  is  the  abiding  principle  of  symmetry 
in  the  body  of  man,  that  goes  erect,  like  an 
upright  soul.  Its  balance  is  equal.  Exterior 
human  symmetry  is  surely  a  curious  physiologi- 
cal fact  where  there  is  no  symmetry  interiorly. 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  85 


For  the  centres  of  life  and  movement  within 
the  body  are  placed  with  Oriental  inequality. 
Man  is  Greek  without  and  Japanese  within. 
But  the  absolute  symmetry  of  the  skeleton 
and  of  the  beauty  and  life  that  cover  it  is 
accurately  a  principle.  It  controls^  but  not 
tyrannously^  all  the  life  of  human  action. 
Attitude  and  motion  disturb  perpetually^  with 
infinite  incidents — inequalities  of  work,  war, 
and  pastime,  inequalities  of  sleep — the  sym- 
metry of  man.  Only  in  death  and  at 
attention  "  is  that  symmetry  complete  in 
attitude.  Nevertheless,  it  rules  the  dance 
and  the  battle,  and  its  rhythm  is  not  to  be 
destroyed.  All  the  more  because  this  hand 
holds  the  goad  and  that  the  harrow,  this 
the  shield  and  that  the  sword,  because  this 
hand  rocks  the  cradle  and  that  caresses  the 
unequal  heads  of  children,  is  this  rhythm 
the  law  ;  and  grace  and  strength  are  inflec- 
tions thereof.  All  human  movement  is  a 
variation  upon  symmetry,  and  without  sym- 
metry it  would  not  be  variation ;  it  would 
be  lawless,  fortuitous,  and  as  dull  and  broad- 
cast as  lawless  art.  The  order  of  inflection 
that  is  not  infraction  has  been  explained  in 
a  most  authoritative  sentence  of  criticism  of 


86      SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT 


literature,  a  sentence  that  should  save  the 
world  the  trouble  of  some  of  its  futile,  violent, 
and  weak  experiments  :  Law,  the  rectitude 
of  humanity,*'  says   Mr   Coventry  Patmore, 

should  be  the  poet's  only  subject,  as,  from 
time  immemorial,  it  has  been  the  subject  of 
true  art,  though  many  a  true  artist  has  done 
the  Muse's  will  and  knew  it  not.  As  all 
the  music  of  verse  arises,  not  from  infraction 
but  from  inflection  of  the  law  of  the  set 
metre ;  so  the  greatest  poets  have  been 
those  the  modulus  of  whose  verse  has  been 
most  variously  and  delicately  inflected,  in 
correspondence  with  feelings  and  passions 
which  are  the  inflections  of  moral  law  in 
their  theme.  Law  puts  a  strain  upon  feeling, 
and  feeling  responds  with  a  strain  upon  law. 
Furthermore,  Aristotle  says  that  the  quality  of 
poetic  language  is  a  continual  slight  novelty. 
In  the  highest  poetry,  like  that  of  Milton, 
these  three  modes  of  inflection,  metrical, 
linguistical,  and  moral,  all  chime  together 
in  praise  of  the  truer  order  of  life." 

And  like  that  order  is  the  order  of  the 
figure  of  man,  an  order  most  beautiful  and 
most  secure  when  it  is  put  to  the  proof. 
That  perpetual  proof  by  perpetual  inflection 


SYMMETRY  AND  INCIDENT  87 


is  the  very  condition  of  life.  Symmetry  is 
a  profound^  if  disregarded  because  perpetually 
inflected^  condition  of  human  life. 

The  nimble  art  of  Japan  is  unessential ; 
it  may  come  and  go^  may  settle  or  be  fanned 
away.  It  has  life  and  it  is  not  without  law ; 
it  has  an  obvious  life^  and  a  less  obvious 
law.  But  with  Greece  abides  the  obvious 
law  and  the  less  obvious  life :  symmetry  as 
apparent  as  the  symmetry  of  the  form  of  man^ 
and  life  occult  like  his  unequal  heart.  And 
this  seems  to  be  the  nobler  and  the  more 
perdurable  relation. 


THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME 

E  who  has  survived  his  childhood 
intelligently  must  become  con- 
scious of  something  more  than 
a  change  in  his  sense  of  the  pre- 
sent and  in  his  apprehension  of  the  future. 
He  must  be  aware  of  no  less  a  thing  than 
the  destruction  of  the  past.  Its  events  and 
empires  stand  where  they  did,  and  the  mere 
relation  of  time  is  as  it  was.  But  that  which 
has  fallen  together,  has  fallen  in,  has  fallen 
close,  and  lies  in  a  little  heap,  is  the  past 
itself — time — the  fact  of  antiquity. 

He  has  grown  into  a  smaller  world  as  he 
has  grown  older.  There  are  no  more  extremi- 
ties. Recorded  time  has  no  more  terrors. 
The  unit  of  measure  which  he  holds  in  his 
hand  has  become  in  his  eyes  a  thing  of 
paltry  length.  The  discovery  draws  in  the 
annals  of  mankind.     He  had  thought  them 

to  be  wide. 
88 


THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME  89 


For  a  man  has  nothing  whereby  to  order 
and  place  the  floods^  the  states,  the  conquests, 
and  the  temples  of  the  past,  except  only  the 
measure  which  he  holds.  Call  that  measure 
a  space  of  ten  years.  His  first  ten  years  had 
given  him  the  illusion  of  a  most  august  scale 
and  measure.  It  was  then  that  he  conceived 
Antiquity.  But  now!  Is  it  to  a  decade  of 
ten  such  little  years  as  these  now  in  his  hand 
— ten  of  his  mature  years — that  men  give  the 
dignity  of  a  century  ?  They  call  it  an  age ; 
but  what  if  life  shows  now  so  small  that  the 
word  age  has  lost  its  gravity? 

In  fact,  when  a  child  begins  to  know  that 
there  is  a  past,  he  has  a  most  noble  rod  to 
measure  it  by  —  he  has  his  own  ten  years. 
He  attributes  an  overwhelming  majesty  to 
all  recorded  time.  He  confers  distance.  He, 
and  he  alone,  bestows  mystery.  Remoteness 
is  his.  He  creates  more  than  mortal  centuries. 
He  sends  armies  fighting  into  the  extremities 
of  the  past.  He  assigns  the  Parthenon  to  a 
hill  of  ages,  and  the  temples  of  Upper  Egypt 
to  sidereal  time. 

If  there  were  no  child,  there  would  be 
nothing  old.  He,  having  conceived  old  time, 
communicates  a  remembrance  at  least  of  the 


90  THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME 


mystery  to  the  mind  of  the  man.  The  man 
perceives  at  last  all  the  illusion,  but  he  cannot 
forget  what  was  his  conviction  when  he  was 
a  child.  He  had  once  a  persuasion  of  An- 
tiquity. And  this  is  not  for  nothing.  The 
enormous  undeception  that  comes  upon  him 
still  leaves  spaces  in  his  mind. 

But  the  undeception  is  rude  work.  The  man 
receives  successive  shocks.  It  is  as  though 
one  strained  level  eyes  towards  the  horizon, 
and  then  were  bidden  to  shorten  his  sight  and 
to  close  his  search  within  a  poor  half  acre 
before  his  face.  Now,  it  is  that  he  suddenly 
perceives  the  hitherto  remote,  remote  youth 
of  his  own  parents  to  have  been  something 
familiarly  near,  so  measured  by  his  new 
standard;  again,  it  is  the  coming  of  Attila 
that  is  displaced.  Those  ten  last  years  of 
his  have  corrected  the  world.  There  needs 
no  other  rod  than  that  ten  years*  rod  to 
chastise  all  the  imaginations  of  the  spirit  of 
man.     It  makes  history  skip. 

To  have  lived  through  any  appreciable  part 
of  any  century  is  to  hold  thenceforth  a  mere 
century  cheap  enough.  But,  it  may  be  said, 
the  mystery  of  change  remains.  Nay,  it  does 
not.     Change  that  trudges  through  our  own 


THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME  91 


world — our  contemporary  world — is  not  very 
mysterious.  We  perceive  its  pace ;  it  is  a 
jog-trot.  Even  so^  we  now  consider,  jolted 
the  changes  of  the  past,  with  the  same  hurry. 

The  man,  therefore,  who  has  intelligently 
ceased  to  be  a  child  scans  through  a  shortened 
avenue  the  reaches  of  the  past.  He  marvels 
that  he  was  so  deceived.  For  it  was  a  very 
deception.  If  the  Argonauts,  for  instance, 
had  been  children,  it  would  have  been  well 
enough  for  the  child  to  measure  their  remote- 
ness and  their  acts  with  his  own  magnificent 
measure.  But  they  were  only  men  and 
demi-gods.  Thus  they  belong  to  him  as  he 
is  now — a  man ;  and  not  to  him  as  he  was 
once — a  child.  It  was  quite  wrong  to  lay 
the  child's  enormous  ten  years'  rule  along 
the  path  from  our  time  to  theirs;  that  path 
must  be  skipped  by  the  nimble  yard  in  the 
man's  present  possession.  Decidedly  the  Ar- 
gonauts are  no  subject  for  the  boy. 

What,  then?  Is  the  record  of  the  race 
nothing  but  a  bundle  of  such  little  times? 
Nay,  it  seems  that  childhood,  which  created 
the  illusion  of  ages,  does  actually  prove  it 
true.  Childhood  is  itself  Antiquity — to  every 
man  his  only  Antiquity.    The  recollection  of 


92  THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME 


childhood  cannot  make  Abraham  old  again  in 
the  mind  of  a  man  of  thirty-five ;  but  the 
beginning  of  every  life  is  older  than  Abraham. 
There  is  the  abyss  of  time.  Let  a  man  turn  to 
his  own  childhood — no  further — if  he  w^ould 
renew  his  sense  of  remoteness,  and  of  the 
mystery  of  change. 

For  in  childhood  change  does  not  go  at  that 
mere  hasty  amble ;  it  rushes ;  but  it  has 
enormous  space  for  its  flight.  The  child 
has  an  apprehension  not  only  of  things  far 
off,  but  of  things  far  apart ;  an  illusive 
apprehension  when  he  is  learning  ancient" 
history  —  a  real  apprehension  when  he  is 
conning  his  own  immeasurable  infancy.  If 
there  is  no  historical  Antiquity  worth  speak- 
ing of,  this  is  the  renewed  and  unnumbered 
Antiquity  for  all  mankind. 

And  it  is  of  this  —  merely  of  this  —  that 
ancient"  history  seems  to  partake.  Rome 
was  founded  when  we  began  Roman  history, 
and  that  is  why  it  seems  long  ago.  Suppose 
the  man  of  thirty-five  heard,  at  that  present 
age,  for  the  first  time  of  Romulus.  Why, 
Romulus  would  be  nowhere.  But  he  built 
his  wall,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  when  every  one 
was  seven  years  old.     It  is  by  good  fortune 


THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME  93 


that  ancient'*  history  is  taught  in  the  only 
ancient  days.  So,  for  a  time,  the  world  is 
magical. 

Modern  history  does  well  enough  for  learn- 
ing later.  But  by  learning  something  of 
antiquity  in  the  first  ten  years,  the  child 
enlarges  the  sense  of  time  for  all  mankind. 
For  even  after  the  great  illusion  is  over  and 
histoiy  is  re-measured,  and  all  fancy  and 
flight  caught  back  and  chastised,  the  enlarged 
sense  remains  enlarged.  The  man  remains 
capable  of  great  spaces  of  time.  He  will 
not  find  them  in  Egypt,  it  is  true,  but  he 
finds  them  within,  he  contains  them,  he  is 
aware  of  them.  History  has  fallen  together, 
but  childhood  surrounds  and  encompasses 
history,  stretches  beyond  and  passes  or.  the 
road  to  eternity. 

He  has  not  passed  in  vain  through  the 
long  ten  years,  the  ten  years  that  are  the 
treasury  of  preceptions — the  first.  The  great 
disillusion  shall  never  shorten  those  years, 
nor  set  nearer  together  the  days  that  made 
them.  Far  apart,''  I  have  said,  and  that 
"far  apart"  is  wonderful.  The  past  of 
childhood  is  not  single,  is  not  motionless, 
nor  fixed  in  one  point;   it  has  summits  a 


94  THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME 


world  away  one  from  the  other.  Year  from 
year  differs  as  the  antiquity  of  Mexico  from 
the  antiquity  of  Chaldea.  And  the  man  of 
thirty-five  knows  for  ever  afterwards  what  is 
flight,  even  though  he  finds  no  great  historic 
distances  to  prove  his  wings  by. 

There  is  a  long  and  mysterious  moment  in 
long  and  mysterious  childhood,  which  is  the 
extremest  distance  known  to  any  human 
fancy.  Many  other  moments,  many  other 
hours,  are  long  in  the  first  ten  years.  Hours 
of  weariness  are  long — not  with  a  mysterious 
length,  but  with  a  mere  length  of  protraction, 
so  that  the  things  called  minutes  and  half- 
hours  by  the  elderly  may  be  something  else 
to  their  apparent  contemporaries,  the  children. 
The  ancient  moment  is  not  merely  one  of 
these  —  it  is  a  space  not  of  long,  but  of 
immeasurable,  time.  It  is  the  moment  of 
going  to  sleep.  The  man  knows  that  border- 
land, and  has  a  contempt  for  it :  he  has 
ong  ceased  to  find  antiquity  there.  It  has 
become  a  common  enough  margin  of  dreams 
to  him;  and  he  does  not  attend  to  its 
phantasies.  He  knows  that  he  has  a  frolic 
spirit  in  his  head  which  has  its  way  at  those 
hours,  but  he  is  not  interested  in  it.    It  is 


THE  ILLUSION  OF  HISTORIC  TIME  95 


the   inexperienced    child   who    passes  with 
simpHcity    through   the    marginal    country ; 
and  the  thing  he  meets  there  is  principally 
the   yet    further    conception    of   illimitable  j 
time. 

His  nurse's  lullaby  is  translated  into  the 
mysteries  of  time.  She  sings  absolutel} 
immemorial  words.  It  matters  little  what 
they  may  mean  to  waking  ears ;  to  the  ears? 
of  a  child  going  to  sleep  they  tell  of  the\ 
beginning  of  the  world.  He  has  fallen  ^ 
asleep  to  the  sound  of  them  all  his  life; 
and  all  his  life means  more  than  older 
speech  can  well  express. 

Ancient  custom  is  formed  i  .  a  single 
spacious  year.  A  child  is  beset  with  long 
traditions.  And  his  infancy  is  so  old^  so 
old^  that  the  mere  adding  of  years  in  the 
life  to  follow  will  not  seem  to  throw  it 
further  back — it  is  already  so  far.  That  is^ 
it  looks  as  remote  to  the  memory  of  a  man 
of  thirty  as  to  that  of  a  man  of  seventy. 
What  are  a  mere  forty  years  of  added  later 
life  in  the  contemplation  of  such  a  distance  ? 
Pshaw ! 


EYES 


HERE  is  nothing  described  with  so 
Httle  attention,  with  such  slovenH- 
ness,  or  so  without  verification — 
albeit  with  so  much  confidence  and 
word-painting  —  as  the  eyes  of  the  men  and 
women  whose  faces  have  been  made  memor- 
abi  by  their  works.  The  describer  generally 
takes  il.^  first  colour  that  seems  to  him  prob- 
able. The  gi  ^y  eyes  of  Coleridge  are  recorded 
in  a  proverbial  line,  and  Procter  repeats  the 
word,  in  describing  from  the  life.  Then 
Carlyle,  who  shows  more  signs  of  actual 
attention,  and  who  caught  a  trick  of  Coler- 
idge's pronunciation  instantly,  proving  that 
with  his  hearing  at  least  he  was  not  slovenly, 
says  that  Coleridge's  eyes  were  brown — 
"  strange,  brown,  timid,  yet  earnest -looking 
eyes."  A  Coleridge  with  brown  eyes  is  one 
man,  and  a  Coleridge  with  grey  eyes  another 
— and,  as  it  were,  more  responsible.  As  to 
96 


EYES 


97 


Rossetti's  eyes^  the  various  inattention  of  his 
friends  has  assigned  to  them,  in  all  the  ready- 
made  phrases,  nearly  all  the  colours. 

So  with  Charlotte  Bronte.  Matthew  Arnold 
seems  to  have  thought  the  most  probable 
thing  to  be  said  of  her  eyes  was  that  they 
were  grey  and  expressive.  Thus,  after  seeing 
them,  does  he  describe  them  in  one  of  his 
letters.  Whereas  Mrs  Gaskell,  who  shows 
signs  of  attention,  says  that  Charlotte's  eyes 
were  a  reddish  hazel,  made  up  of  ^^a  great 
variety  of  tints,' '  to  be  discovered  by  close 
looking.  Almost  all  eyes  that  are  not  brown 
are,  in  fact,  of  some  such  mixed  colour,  gen- 
erally spotted  in,  and  the  effect  is  vivacious. 
All  the  more  if  the  speckled  iris  has  a  dark 
ring  to  enclose  it. 

Nevertheless,  the  eye  of  mixed  colour  has 
always  a  definite  character,  and  the  mingling 
that  looks  green  is  quite  unlike  the  mingling 
that  looks  grey;  and  among  the  greys  there 
is  endless  difference.  Brown  eyes  alone  are 
apart,  unlike  all  others,  but  having  no  variety 
except  in  the  degrees  of  their  darkness. 

The  colour  of  eyes  seems  to  be  significant 
of  temperament,  but  as  regards  beauty  there 
is  little  or  nothing  to  choose  among  colours. 

G 


98 


EYES 


It  is  not  the  eye,  but  the  eyehd,  that  is 
important,  beautiful,  eloquent,  full  of  secrets. 
The  eye  has  nothing  but  its  colour,  and  all 
colours  are  fine  within  fine  eyelids.  The 
eyelid  has  all  the  form,  all  the  drawing,  all 
the  breadth  and  length ;  the  square  of  great 
eyes  irregularly  wide ;  the  long  corners  of 
narrow  eyes ;  the  pathetic  outward  droop ; 
the  delicate  contrary  suggestion  of  an  upward 
turn  at  the  outer  corner,  which  Sir  Joshua 
loved. 

It  is  the  blood  that  is  eloquent,  and  there 
is  no  sign  of  blood  in  the  eye ;  but  in  the 
eyelid  the  blood  hides  itself  and  shows  its 
signs.  All  along  its  edges  are  the  little 
muscles,  living,  that  speak  not  only  the  ob- 
vious and  emphatic  things,  but  what  reluc- 
tances, what  perceptions,  what  ambiguities, 
what  half- apprehensions,  what  doubts,  what 
interceptions !  The  eyelids  confess,  and  reject, 
and  refuse  to  reject.  They  have  expressed 
all  things  ever  since  man  was  man. 

And  they  express  so  much  by  seeming  to 
hide  or  to  reveal  that  which  indeed  expresses 
nothing.  For  there  is  no  message  from  the 
eye.  It  has  direction,  it  moves,  in  the  service 
of  the  sense  of  sight ;  it  receives  the  messages 


EYES 


99 


of  the  world.  But  expression  is  outward,  and 
the  eye  has  it  not.  There  are  no  windows 
of  the  soul,  there  are  only  curtains ;  and  these 
show  all  things  by  seeming  to  hide  a  little 
more,  a  little  less.  They  hide  nothing  but 
their  own  secrets. 

But,  some  may  say,  the  eyes  have  emotion 
inasmuch  as  they  betray  it  by  the  waxing 
and  contracting  of  the  pupils.  It  is,  how- 
ever, the  rarest  thing,  this  opening  and  nar- 
rowing under  any  influences  except  those  of 
darkness  and  light.  It  does  take  place  ex- 
ceptionally; but  I  am  doubtful  whether  those 
who  talk  of  it  have  ever  really  been  attentive 
enough  to  perceive  it.  A  nervous  woman, 
brown  -  eyed  and  young,  who  stood  to  tell 
the  news  of  her  own  betrothal,  and  kept  her 
manners  exceedingly  composed  as  she  spoke, 
had  this  waxing  and  closing  of  the  pupils; 
it  went  on  all  the  time  like  a  slow,  slow 
pulse.  But  such  a  thing  is  not  to  be  seen 
once  a  year. 

Moreover,  it  is  —  though  so  significant — 
hardly  to  be  called  expression.  It  is  not 
articulate.  It  implies  emotion,  but  does  not 
define,  or  describe,  or  divide  it.  It  is  touch- 
ing, insomuch  as  we  have  knowledge  of  the 


100 


EYES 


perturbed  tide  of  the  spirit  that  must  cause 
it,  but  it  is  not  otherwise  eloquent.  It  does 
not  tell  us  the  quality  of  the  thought,  it 
does  not  inform  and  surprise  us  with  intri- 
cacies. It  speaks  no  more  explicit  or  delicate 
things  than  does  the  pulse  in  its  quickening. 
It  speaks  with  less  division  of  meanings  than 
does  the  taking  of  the  breath,  which  has 
impulses  and  degrees. 

No,  the  eyes  do  their  work,  but  do  it 
blankly,  without  communication.  Openings 
into  the  being  they  may  be,  but  the  closed 
cheek  is  more  communicative.  From  them 
the  blood  of  Perdita  never  did  look  out.  It 
ebbed  and  flowed  in  her  face,  her  dance, 
her  talk.  It  was  hiding  in  her  paleness,  and 
cloistered  in  her  reserve,  but  visible  in  prison. 
It  leapt  and  looked,  at  a  word.  It  was  con- 
scious in  the  fingers  that  reached  out  flowers. 
It  ran  with  her.  It  was  silenced  when  she 
hushed  her  answers  to  the  king.  Everywhere 
it  was  close  behind  the  doors — ever3rwhere 
but  in  her  eyes. 

How  near  at  hand  was  it,  then,  in  the 
living  eyelids  that  expressed  her  in  their 
minute  and  instant  and  candid  manner!  All 
her  withdrawals,   every  hesitation,  fluttered 


EYES 


101 


there.  A  flock  of  meanings  and  intelligences 
alighted  on  those  mobile  edges. 

Think,  then,  of  all  the  famous  eyes  in  the 
world,  that  said  so  much,  and  said  it  in  no 
other  way  but  only  by  the  little  exquisite 
muscles  of  their  lids.  How  were  these  ever 
strong  enough  to  bear  the  burden  of  those 
eyes  of  HeathclifF's  in    Wuthering  Heights  "  ? 

The  clouded  windows  of  Hell  flashed  a  mo- 
ment towards  me ;  the  fiend  which  usually 
looked  out,  however,  was   so  dimmed  and 

drowned  "      That  mourning  fiend,  who 

had  wept  all  night,  had  no  expression,  no 
proof  or  sign  of  himself,  except  in  the  edges 
of  the  eyelids  of  the  man. 

And  the  eyes  of  Garrick }  Eyelids,  again. 
And  the  eyes  of  Charles  Dickens,  that  were 
said  to  contain  the  life  of  fifty  men?  On 
the  mechanism  of  the  eyelids  hung  that  fifty- 
fold  vitality.  "Bacon  had  a  delicate,  lively, 
hazel  eye,"  says  Aubrey  in  his  "Lives  of 
Eminent  Persons."  But  nothing  of  this  be- 
longs to  the  eye  except  the  colour.  Mere 
brightness  the  eyeball  has  or  has  not,  but 
so  have  many  glass  beads :  the  liveliness  is 
the  eyelid's.  "Dr  Harvey  told  me  it  was 
like  the  eie  of  a  viper."    So  intent  and  nar- 


102 


EYES 


rowed  must  have  been  the  attitude  of  Bacon's 
eyelids. 

"  I  never  saw  such  another  eye  in  a  human 
head,"  says  Scott  in  describing  Bums, 
"though  I  have  seen  the  most  distinguished 
men  in  my  time.  It  was  large,  and  of  a 
dark  cast,  and  glowed  (I  say  literally  glowed^ 
when  he  spoke  with  feeling  or  interest.  The 
eye  alone,  I  think,  indicated  the  poetical 
character  and  temperament."  No  eye  literally 
glows ;  but  some  eyes  are  polished  a  little 
more,  and  reflect.  And  this  is  the  utmost 
that  can  possibly  have  been  true  as  to  the 
eyes  of  Burns.  But  set  within  the  meanings 
of  impetuous  eyelids  the  lucidity  of  the  dark 
eyes  seemed  broken,  moved,  directed  into 
fiery  shafts. 

See,  too,  the  reproach  of  little,  sharp,  grey 
eyes  addressed  to  Hazlitt.  There  are  neither 
large  nor  small  eyes,  say  physiologists,  or  the 
difference  is  so  small  as  to  be  negligeable. 
But  in  the  eyelids  the  difference  is  great 
between  large  and  small,  and  also  between 
the  varieties  of  largeness.  Some  have  large 
openings,  and  some  are  in  themselves  broad 
and  long,  serenely  covering  eyes  called  small. 
Some   have  far  more  drawing  than  others. 


EYES 


103 


and  interesting  foreshortenings  and  sweeping 
curves. 

Where  else  is  spirit  so  evident?  And 
where  else  is  it  so  spoilt  ?  There  is  no  vul- 
garity like  the  vulgarity  of  vulgar  eyelids. 
They  have  a  slang  all  their  own,  of  an  in- 
tolerable kind.  And  eyelids  have  looked  all 
the  cruel  looks  that  have  ever  made  wounds 
in  innocent  souls  meeting  them  surprised. 

But  all  love  and  all  genius  have  winged 
their  flight  from  those  slight  and  unmeasur- 
able  movements,  have  flickered  on  the  mar- 
gins of  lovely  eyelids  quick  with  thought. 
Life,  spirit,  sweetness  are  there  in  a  small 
place;  using  the  finest  and  the  slenderest 
machinery ;  expressing  meanings  a  whole 
world  apart,  by  a  difference  of  material 
action  so  fine  that  the  sight  which  ap- 
preciates it  cannot  detect  it ;  expressing 
intricacies  of  intellect ;  so  incarnate  in  slen- 
der and  sensitive  flesh  that  nowhere  else  in 
the  body  of  inan  is  flesh  so  spiritual. 


PRINTED  BY 
W.  H.  WHITE  AND  CO.  LTD. 
EDINBURGH  RIVERSIDE  PRESS 


